“Ma. People are looking. Let it go.”
Sloan laughed once, soft, the laugh of a woman who had decided the room would follow her. “Harrison, tell her it’s just a frame. I’ll print another one.”
Eleanor’s gaze moved from her son’s face to the gold wristwatch gleaming on the white lounger where Sloan had left it while she circulated, glittering, among the guests. Eleanor walked to the lounger. She picked up the watch. The metal was warm from the afternoon. She weighed it in her palm the way she had once weighed the key to that house—testing what something cost by how it sat in the hand.
“You won’t print anything. You’ll watch.”
Harrison stepped closer. “Ma, don’t. That watch was eighteen hundred.”
Eleanor walked to the pool’s edge. The cousins had stopped pretending not to listen. Iced tea glasses hung forgotten. She opened her fingers.
The watch fell. It turned once in the air, a small bright wheel, and entered the water with a sound that carried—metal and glass and the soft violence of something expensive learning gravity. It sank beside the photograph. Young Eleanor and the watch lay together on the tile, two gold things drowning in daylight.