Dan Writes

  Chapter Seven: Fool's Gold Eli opened his hand. The ring sat in his palm under the amber light, simple and clean and patient, the way it had been patient in the display case for the past three weeks while the city moved around it and the snow came and went and two men stood at the window on separate evenings and looked at it and thought about what it meant and arrived, on the same Christmas Eve, at the same shop, at the same moment. He looked at James. He looked at Adam. Then he walked to James and held out his hand and James took the ring from him with both of his and held it the way a man holds something he has been moving toward for a long time without always knowing that is what he was doing. "Merry Christmas, James," Eli said. James looked at the ring in his hands. He did not say anything for a moment. When he looked up his eyes were the same pale gray they had always been, but something in them was different, some quality of tension that had been there all...

Chapter Six: The Jeweler Speaks Eli Saron had not intended to say anything beyond what a judge is required to say. He had intended to listen, which he had done. He had intended to observe, which he had also done. He had intended, at the end of the evening, to make a quiet decision about the ring and deliver it without ceremony and send both men home to whatever was waiting for them there. He had not intended to talk about his wife. But there is a thing that happens sometimes, in rooms where honest things have been said, where the honesty becomes a kind of gravity and pulls more honesty toward it, and Eli had been in this shop for twenty-three years and had felt that gravity many times and had always, until tonight, managed to stay on the correct side of it. He looked at the two men across from him. The young one with the Iraqi blood and the inherited determination and the company balanced on a wire. The old one with the gray eyes and fifty-one years and the bottle he had put down...

  Chapter Five: The Descent and the Return James was quiet for a moment before he began the second half. He picked up his coffee cup, found it empty, set it back down. He looked at the window. The snow was serious now, the kind that accumulates, the kind that changes the sound of the street outside by absorbing it. Halsted was quieter than it had been an hour ago. The city was going home. He turned back and looked at Adam. Then at Eli. Then at his hands. "The medals," he said. "You want to know about the medals." Neither man had asked about them. "I had a box of them," James said. "From the Gulf, from Afghanistan, from Iraq. A box you keep in the closet because you don't know what else to do with it and putting it on the wall feels like something you're not ready to claim." He paused. "I threw the box away in 2011. Not because I was ashamed of it. Because I needed to stop using it as a reason not to look at the rest of my life...

Chapter Four: The Climb There is a version of Adam Zayn's story that is very easy to tell. Iraqi-American kid, first generation, parents who rebuilt themselves from nothing in a country that was not always interested in making that easy. Kid grows up watching his father study at kitchen tables after warehouse shifts, absorbs the lesson, applies it with interest. Goes to university, finds his thing, builds a company, files for an IPO. Classic American story, the kind that gets written up in trade publications with a photograph of the founder standing in front of a whiteboard with his arms crossed, looking like he always knew it would turn out this way. Adam had been written up twice. He had stood in front of the whiteboard. He had crossed his arms. The photographs were not inaccurate. They were just incomplete, the way photographs always are, because a photograph captures the arrangement of a face but not the conversation happening behind it. He told the next part of his story...