The Locket
Entry #1 — 2:19 a.m.
If this diary becomes what I suspect it will become—a record, a confession, a list of all the things I told myself were necessary—then let it begin with the plainest truth.
My name is Patricia Vaughn. I am thirty-four years old. I am a real estate broker, which means I spend most of my life smiling in doorways, pretending houses are futures instead of walls, and pretending I am not drowning.
I am broke.
Not romantic broke. Not charming, struggling, someday-I’ll-make-it broke. I mean the kind of broke where you wear a tailored blazer over a blouse you bought on clearance and hope no one notices the shoes are two seasons old. I mean the kind where your phone lights up with payment reminders and you silence it like it’s a sick animal. I mean credit cards maxed, car lease overdue, a commission drought long enough that my savings account has become a joke I no longer laugh at.
And still, I keep a diary. As if I am a woman with a future.
The only thing keeping me from total collapse is the Hollis estate.
The Hollis estate is my career-making listing, if I can sell it. A decaying mansion on the edge of town, set back behind iron gates gone rust-brown and oaks that have forgotten they were ornamental. It has been on the market for over a year. Two agencies dropped it. The current owner’s attorney keeps calling me like I’m a priest he’s hired to perform a miracle. The house is beautiful in the way old wounds are beautiful: dramatic, excessive, impossible to ignore.
No one wants it.
No one except me, apparently, because if I close this sale, I can pay off the worst of the debt. I can stop calculating whether I can afford gas before driving across town. I can stop lying to my landlord about when the check is coming.
So here I am: sitting in a rundown coffee shop in the middle of the night, the fluorescent light buzzing over me like a trapped fly, debating whether to pawn the locket my grandmother gave me.
It is gold, or mostly gold. Old-fashioned. The clasp is weak. Inside there is no photograph, only a faint scratch on the left side, as if someone once tried to carve a letter and changed their mind. I have worn it so often it feels less like jewelry and more like a second pulse.
I keep turning it over in my fingers.
The pawnshop on Ninth opens at seven. If I go early, I can get maybe three hundred. Maybe four if the man behind the counter is feeling sentimental, which he never is. Three hundred would cover the electric bill and part of the car payment. Four hundred would buy me another week of pretending I am still a functioning adult.
I am sitting there with the locket in one hand and my cold coffee in the other when the bell over the door chimes.
She walks in like she has never once doubted she was allowed wherever she happens to be.
A beautiful woman. Almond-shaped eyes. An expensive beige pantsuit, the kind that looks simple until you notice the cut, the fabric, the way it moves. No logos. No obvious jewelry. Nothing performative about her at all. That is how I know she is rich. Poor people dress to be seen. Wealthy people dress to be remembered.
The coffee shop is the sort of place with cracked vinyl booths, a pastry case that smells faintly of burnt sugar, and a barista who looks as tired as the espresso machine. She does not belong here. She belongs in a private club, or a gallery opening, or the back seat of a car with tinted windows.
And yet she comes straight to my booth.
“Is this seat taken?” she asks.
I look around. The place is empty except for a man asleep over a newspaper and the barista wiping the counter with no urgency.
“No,” I say. “It’s free.”
She sits.
Up close, she is even more striking. Not young, exactly, though she has the smooth, rested face of someone who has never been forced to beg for sleep. Her hair is dark and glossy. Her mouth looks as if it knows a joke and is deciding whether you deserve to hear it.
“You’ve been staring at that locket for ten minutes,” she says.
I close my hand around it instinctively.
“It was my grandmother’s.”
“Then it’s worth more than whatever you’re planning to get for it.”
My face heats. “I wasn’t—”
“You were.”
She says it without judgment. That is the strange thing. She does not sound cruel. She sounds as if she is reading a listing agreement and has found one clause that interests her.
“I’m Patricia,” I say, because I need to say something.
“Plum.”
“Plum?”
She smiles. “Would you prefer something else?”
I laugh before I can stop myself. “No. Plum is fine.”
Her eyes drop to the folder on the table. I have been carrying the Hollis file everywhere, as if obsession can substitute for luck. The cover photo shows the mansion in better light than it deserves: grand windows, stone steps, the illusion of permanence.
“What’s that?” Plum asks.
“A listing,” I say. “The Hollis estate.”
Something changes in her face. Not much. A stillness. The way a cat goes still when it hears something under the floorboards.
“Still standing, then,” she says.
I frown. “You know it?”
“I know of it.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No,” she says. “It isn’t.”
She studies me then, and I have the absurd sensation that she is not looking at my face but at the structure beneath it. The bones. The load-bearing parts. The places where I might crack.
“You want to sell it,” she says.
“I want to sell everything.”
“Desperate or ambitious?”
“Is there a difference?”
Her smile sharpens. “Usually.”
I should have felt insulted. Instead, I feel seen. That is dangerous. I have spent years perfecting the polished-broker act: the confident voice, the neat hair, the careful optimism. People see the act. They rarely see the woman sweating underneath it.
Plum sees her.
“I can get you a buyer,” she says.
I blink. “Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
I glance down at the file. “The house needs work.”
“All houses need work.”
“It’s been listed for over a year.”
“Houses don’t sell because they’re easy. They sell because someone finally wants them badly enough.”
I lean back. The vinyl booth creaks under me. “And you know someone who wants it?”
She does not answer immediately. Her gaze drops again to the locket in my hand.
“Don’t pawn that,” she says.
“Why?”
“Because some things are given to you to keep you from making mistakes.”
I almost laugh. “I’m not sure my grandmother’s jewelry counts as financial planning.”
“No,” Plum says. “But you’ll keep it anyway.”
I don’t know why that unsettles me more than anything else she has said.
She stands, smoothing the front of her beige pantsuit as if she has concluded a meeting. For a second I think she is going to leave without another word. Instead, she slides a card across the table. Cream-colored. Heavy stock. No company name. Just a phone number and the word PLUM printed in elegant black type.
“Call me,” she says.
“About the Hollis estate?”
She looks at me then with those almond-shaped eyes, and for one strange, stupid moment, I feel as if she is asking a different question entirely.
“Call me,” she says, “when you’re ready to stop pretending it’s only a house.”
Then she leaves.
I sit there for a long time. The coffee is cold. The locket is warm. Outside, the streetlight flickers over the empty parking lot.
I do not pawn the locket.
I tell myself it is sentiment.
I tell myself I am tired.
I tell myself Plum is just another eccentric buyer, another strange late-night encounter in a city full of them.
But when I finally leave the coffee shop, I take the card with me.
And I do not throw it away.