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Magdalena has been in this business for a very long time. Her grandfather opened the small jewelry store just off the main shopping streets of Barcelona many, many years ago. He passed it on to Magdalena’s father, and she took over from him when she was old enough. She helped in the store from the time she was a child, and she always loved it.
She loved the shine of the pieces of jewelry in their displays and shop windows, and she loved the way some pieces were just made for the people who ended up wearing them. She always felt like the moment you found the right piece had a little magic inherent, and she never tired of seeing the joy, the excitement, and happiness in the eyes of their customers when it happened.
When she was little, she once asked her grandfather if he wasn’t concerned that one beautiful necklace he had made, spending hours and hours crafting it, had not been sold for years. She remembered how expensive the materials were, how long he planned it before he started to work on it, and how proud he was when it was finally done.
But now it sat in its case, and nobody seemed to want it. It made her sad.
Her grandfather gave her a kind smile and ruffled her hair.
“It’s waiting,” he just said.
She didn’t understand at the time, but now, after all these years, she knows exactly what he was talking about. Sometimes, you have to be patient in your quest to find the right person for the right piece.
And Magdalena has never had a customer she couldn’t make happy. If they give her time, tell her what they’re looking for, and are open-minded to her ideas, she guarantees she will find the perfect match.
She simply loves this profession because of the satisfaction she feels when a customer leaves with a piece as unique as the person who’s going to wear it.
And that is the reason she still sometimes stands in their tiny store, even though she passed it on to her daughter many years ago, and frankly, has every right to sit back and just enjoy her retirement. She will be eighty next month, after all.
But as long as she feels the thrill, the excitement, she is happy to help out on weekends or before the big holidays, or even cover an afternoon shift on her own here and there, on work days when there’s not so much to do.
Quiet days like today. It’s a Thursday afternoon, and so far, Magdalena only had to hand out a watch they had in to repair the clasp.
A few tourists stopped to look at their window displays, but so far, no one had entered the shop. She contemplates whether she should go to the backroom and make herself a third cup of coffee (what her daughter doesn’t know can’t hurt her, after all) when a young man stops at the window.
He can’t be older than thirty, and he’s clearly a tourist, wearing a dark parka that’s way too warm for the weather they got this week. Even though he’s wearing sunglasses, she can see that he looks decidedly unhappy.
Someone who is looking to buy something to apologize rather than to celebrate, Magdalena decides, and starts to imagine the story of the young man.
Maybe he got caught cheating and now wants to try to salvage what he can. Maybe he forgot an anniversary. She tries to get a better look, but both of his hands are shoved deep into the pockets of his parka, so she can’t see if he’s wearing a wedding ring.
He’s looking a bit nervous, too, turning around multiple times, looking up and down the street as if he’s afraid someone might notice him.
Doesn’t he want to be seen? Why? Maybe he doesn’t want to apologize? Maybe he wants to buy something for his affair and feels guilty?
Now, Magdalena is truly invested. She contemplates sending a short prayer to the Virgin Mary, asking her to give this intriguing young man the courage to enter her store, but before she can do that, she practically sees how he gathers his courage and then takes a step forward to open the door.
She smiles brightly and greets him, and gets a muttered ‘hello’ back. She knows immediately she was right. He’s definitely a tourist. An Englishman, most likely.
Her English is not the best, and she’s not willing to learn any more of it at her age, but she knows they will get by. The jewelry speaks for itself in any case.
She gives him time to pursue the displays inside their store, paying close attention to where his gaze lingers and what he dismisses.
He has shoved his sunglasses into his dark hair, and she watches as his striking blue eyes, which sit under a pair of prominent eyebrows, flit over the displays.
He’s not interested in the watches, which does not surprise her, and he gives the wedding and engagement rings only brief glances before he moves on.
So, he’s not looking to propose, she states with some satisfaction, happy that another one of her first impressions was correct.
His gaze lingers on some necklaces before he comes to stand in front of the cases where they display their rings.
Rows and rows of bands, some simple and some elaborate, some delicate and some more sturdy, in gold, silver, and platinum, are lined up, every single piece hand-crafted in their own workshop.
This much work and quality certainly have a price, and she wonders if he knows what kind of store he entered, if he realized there are no price tags in their displays, if he can even afford what they are offering.
But just then, he lifts his left hand out of its pocket (no wedding ring there!), and she sees the watch he’s wearing, and she suddenly knows that money won’t be a problem.
When she’s confident that he won’t bolt out of the store as soon as she speaks, she looks at him over her glasses, a welcoming and conspirational smile on her face, and says,
“You need to say sorry?”
He looks up, startled, as if he didn’t expect to be addressed.
“What?” he asks, and as they make eye contact, Magdalena is once again taken by his eyes, which are so very blue and so expressive and emotive.
She makes a gesture, indicating the jewelry on display.
“A gift,” she says, “to say sorry?”
He huffs a laugh, surprised, and cards a sheepish hand through his hair, messing it up a little more.
“That obvious, huh?”
Internally, Magdalena is ready to do a little victory dance for guessing right once again. Years and years of experience, and this little game she plays with herself when she assesses a customer still delights her to no end.
But she is a professional first and foremost, and so she just gives him a kind smile and shrugs her shoulders.
“Me,” she says, pointing at herself and then at the store again, “almost 70 years.”
The man whistles, looking impressed. “Well, I guess you’re an expert then,” he says, and she nods and smiles, satisfied.
When he fails to say anything else and once again looks at the displays, she debates letting him be, but she has always been too curious for her own good, and they were making progress anyway, weren’t they?
“Well?” She asks, not demanding or impatient, but with a smile in her voice and slightly teasing. She feels like when she is talking to her grandchildren, when she patiently has to coax their answers out of them, to find out if they got into some mischief, she has to salvage before her daughter catches them.
He looks up again, surprised as if he’s not used to people digging deeper when he didn’t answer a question and doesn’t look particularly inclined to do so anytime soon. He certainly seems like a man not easily swayed.
They look at each other for a few moments, and Magdalena is content to wait for him to decide if he wants to answer, to ponder what he wants to share and what he wants to keep to himself. Finally, he chuckles again, slightly bitterly, and shakes his head.
“Yeah, I fucked up,” he says, and Magdalena might not be a fan of his language, but she certainly gets the picture.
“Bad?” She asks next and watches once again how he weighs his words.
A private person, this young man. Cagey with what he wants to share, undoubtedly. But in his effort to protect his privacy, he seems to forget his eyes. His beautiful blue eyes that tell stories of their own, swimming with emotion and pain.
She looks into his eyes and knows it’s bad before he sighs and nods.
“Yeah, I guess so,” he says.
“You cheat?” she asks, trying to keep her disapproval out of her voice and failing slightly.
And yes, this might be a way too personal a question for a jewelry seller to ask, but she needs to know. She might know which pieces will make a woman forgive an affair, will make her take her man back after he hurt her, and has sold her fair share of them over the years, but that doesn’t mean she has to like it.
The young man looks taken aback.
“What?” he asks, disbelieving, before he shakes his head.
“What the fuck? No, I didn’t cheat, Jesus.”
She nods, relieved. She should treat every customer with the same care; she knows this. But she feels immensely more inclined to help him now she knows he hasn’t been unfaithful.
“I…” he starts and then sighs again before he continues.
“I said some things I shouldn’t have said. Hurtful stuff. Pretty awful stuff, to be honest. Most of it wasn’t even true, but we had a bit to drink, and we got into an argument, and I was so fucking angry, and…”
He trails off, looking at a display case without seeing anything, his gaze far away, no doubt reliving the argument he had with his girlfriend. Because even though Magdalena hasn’t seen his other hand yet, by now, she’s pretty sure there won’t be a wedding band, either.
“You love her?” she asks gently, and he looks like she dragged him out of his thoughts, as if he’s surprised he was having a conversation before his mind drifted off.
He looks down and finally pulls his other hand out of its pocket and starts playing with the signet ring he wears on his little finger. (She was right. No wedding ring.)
He looks almost shy, and his voice is soft, almost a whisper when he says “Yeah. I really, really do.”
Magdalena’s heart might melt just a little bit at the wealth of emotion in his voice, on his face. This boy is head over heels for his lady. He made a mistake, and he wants to apologize, wants to show how much this person means to him.
And she knows she will do her very best to help him, won’t let him leave her shop until they find the perfect piece to give his special someone to make everything right again. But to be able to do that, she needs to know a little more about this person who makes him look like a lovesick teenager.
“She pretty?” she asks a little teasingly, and he chuckles again, still looking at his hands.
“Pretty as a fucking princess,” he mutters, but then he sighs, tired and long-suffering, and adds, a tad exasperated, “But he also drives me up the fucking walls, doesn’t he?”
Magdalena stops. Blinks. It might be the heavy accent he speaks in or her hearing that’s not the best anymore in her old age, but that sounded like…
Before she can ask, can even begin to contemplate how to ask him to clarify who he exactly is shopping for, without sounding insensitive and, more importantly, without scaring him away when he discovers his slip-up (if there even was a slip-up), he continues.
Apparently, he made up his mind and lost a bit of his shyness around her.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says, more determined, his voice firm and strong. “I fucked up, and I said stuff that was uncalled for. I acted like a proper fucking prick. And now, I need…I just want something to show that I…that I’m here. That I’m not going away. Never. I need something that says that I will never fucking leave, no matter how much we want to smash each other’s heads in. That this is fucking it, for me. It always has been.”
As he says it, there’s a fire in his eyes that burns like molten lava. He means every single word, and Magdalena is blown away by the intensity of his love and the determination in his eyes.
She nods.
“A statement,” she says, looking for confirmation. He nods, looking relieved that she understands what he needs.
“But not one of these,” she adds, and gestures to the engagement rings he had almost paid no attention to when he first came in.
His gaze follows the direction she points in, and his eyes linger on the display for a little while. But then he shakes his head, and he almost looks like he’s blushing.
“No,” he says softly. “Not one of these.”
She nods again, more to herself this time. More information would be good, but she is honestly not sure if she would get more out of him at this point; it looks like his emotional confession cost him a lot. And anyway, this is a good start. They can work from here.
She opens the display and pulls out a few tablets of rings.
“Gold? Silver?” she asks, watching as he looks over the rows, dismissing the delicate ones right away, his gaze lingering on a few more sturdy ones.
He hums, obviously deep in thought.
“Not sure,” he mutters, and she nods to herself, trying another approach.
“Diamonds?” she asks, gesturing to a few rings with prominent and shining stones as their centerpieces.
He pulls a face. “Nah, I don’t think so,” he says, and she smiles.
Something unique, then. She likes him more by the minute.
She pulls out another tablet. Most of these rings are a little sturdier, a little bolder than the first one she presented, and the inlays and centerpieces are more…special. Rarer stones, no diamonds, and sometimes even something unique, like wood or ivory. Most of them were made by her father, who loved to work with unconventional materials.
The young man looks over the rows, humming softly to himself, a tune she thinks she has heard somewhere before, and then he suddenly stops.
“What’s this?” he asks, pointing to a platinum ring, which is somewhat similar in its form to the signet ring he wears. But in its center, it holds a very special kind of dark stone.
Magdalena smiles, more than pleased. This exceptional young man; he certainly has a good eye.
“Star,” she says, and he looks up at her, his gaze quizzical.
“Star?” he repeats, and she nods, mimicking a shooting star traveling through the sky with her hands.
It’s one of the most unique pieces they have ever made and, without a doubt, the rarest material her father had ever worked with.
A long time ago, a small meteorite came down not too far outside of Barcelona, and a family friend was able to gather a small piece of the debris when he visited the crater many years ago, before it was completely closed off by the authorities.
It was not exactly legal, but…well. It was many years ago, and times were different. And Magdalena has loved this ring with all her heart since it was made.
It has been in their display case for many, many years already, maybe because it is too sturdy for most women’s hands. But the ring has to be to do the dark core element justice. The polished platinum frame lets it look even darker and maybe more mysterious, too.
As her grandfather would say, it’s one of the pieces that had to wait.
She looks at the young man, sees the moment he gets what she was trying to explain, and thinks giddily that maybe today, the day has come when this ring’s wait ends.
“It’s really from a star?” he asks, sounding intrigued but unconvinced. “Like, from fucking out of space?”
She nods.
“My father made this ring,” she says, pulling it from the display and handing it to him.
He takes it almost reverently, turning it over in his hands and holding it into the light to get a better look at the dark stone. It glints in the overhead lights, looks like all the stars of the sky are trapped in its center.
He seems enamored with the piece; she sees he clearly loves it already, but there’s still doubt in his gaze as if he’s not a hundred percent sure she’s not just telling him a nice fairy tale to sell the ring, and suddenly, Magdalena wants nothing more than to convince him that this is the right piece — this is the one he has to buy for this woman who has captured his heart so entirely. Because she believes wholeheartedly that this is the case.
“One moment,” she says, holding up a finger and retreating into the little back room.
She knows he could run out of the door with this ring, never to be seen again, but somehow she is certain he won’t. Her daughter would yell at her for her carelessness, she knows, but Magdalena didn’t do this job for so many years for nothing. She knows her people. She knows he won’t just leave.
She rummages in her desk for some time, opening and closing drawers and muttering under her breath until she finds what she’s looking for. With a tiny noise of triumph, she pulls out the article about the crater and the investigations conducted there and returns to the salesroom.
The young man still stands where she left him, as she knew he would. He’s still studying the ring and once again looks like he’s lost in his thoughts.
She presents him with the article, and even though it’s in Spanish, she knows the picture speaks for itself.
“Star,” she says once again, pointing at the picture of the crater and once again mimicking a shooting star, and then she watches how he looks in wonder between the picture and the ring, and she imagines his girl, a beautiful thing no doubt, with stars living behind her eyes, and she knows this piece found its home.
“It’s perfect,” he whispers, and she knows he realized it, too.
“It might be too big,” she says carefully, ready to offer to resize it. But he just looks at the ring for a moment and then takes off his signet ring. When he puts it on his own little finger instead, it fits perfectly, and he looks at it and smiles, satisfied.
“Nah,” he says. “It’s perfect as it is.”
A few days later, Magdalena and her daughter are watching TV in the evening, and when the local news come on, they show a report about a concert that took place in the Olympic stadium two days ago.
“Oh, Cecilie told me about it,” Magdalena’s daughter says, excited.
“She was there. When we met for coffee yesterday, she couldn’t stop gushing about the singer.”
She mimics her best friend's tone of voice and pretends to faint as she exclaims, “So pretty!” and Magdalena laughs, delighted by her daughter’s antics.
But then suddenly, the coverage switches from the anchorwoman to a clip from the concert, and Magdalena’s eyes widen as soon as she realizes she recognizes one of the band members. It’s the same young man who bought her special ring a few days ago.
Only now, he’s not the quiet boy with the shy smile she got to know. She sees him standing on this stage, playing his guitar in front of thousands of screaming fans, and he looks like he’s the king of the world.
Magdalena stares at the crowd's size and thinks that this might explain why he didn’t even hesitate when she told him how much the ring cost; he just nodded as if he expected having to pay this much and handed over his credit card without hesitation.
She looks at him, fascinated that this is the same person she spoke to in her store, when her daughter starts talking again.
“They’re brothers,” she says. “Cecilie told me there were rumors they got into a huge fight the night before the show and that the organizers even feared they might have to cancel. But in the end nothing was confirmed, and as you can see, they did play, and they certainly don’t look like they were cross with each other if you ask me.”
Magdalena wants to ask something — she doesn’t even know what — when the clip shows the singer of this band, the brother, without any doubt, and she stops dead in her tracks, her eyes going wide.
He’s truly a beautiful boy, young and wild. His eyes, which peek out from under his unruly and tousled hair, are the same shade of blue as his brother’s and have the same endless myriad of emotions swimming in them.
The girls in the audience go absolutely crazy, screaming and crying to get his attention, but he doesn’t even seem to notice them. Magdalena watches the clip fascinated and thinks he looks like he’s in his own world as he sings.
She pays special attention to his eyes — she can’t look away from them, actually — even when he abandons his microphone and dances more than walks over the stage to where his brother is standing and playing his guitar.
When he reaches him, he steps behind him really close, hooks his chin over his shoulder, and throws one arm over the other so that his splayed palm comes to rest right above his brother’s heart. All of his movements look so languid, so casual, but the gesture itself is wildly possessive.
It strikes Magdalena as strange, and she wonders if nobody really realizes what he’s trying to say without words, what he’s trying to tell their screaming audience. But then something catches her eye, and she looks closer at his hand and feels like the blood freezes in her veins.
“Dios mio,” Magdalena gasps.
Because on his hand, on the hand of this beautiful boy with stars in his eyes, that rests over his older brother’s heart, is her ring.
She would recognize it anywhere: the piece her father made with hours of hard work, the ring that had sat in its display case for years, waiting for the right person.
She looks at the boy, and even though she feels like she can’t breathe, she knows it's perfect. She knows this ring was made for him and him alone. It's the perfect piece for this undoubtedly special young man.
And she remembers his brother standing in her shop and saying, “I will never fucking leave” and “This is it, for me,” with an earnestness that made his words sound like an oath. The person with stars in their eyes, the one he called pretty as a princess and that he’s so clearly and irrevocably in love with, is not some special young lady.
It’s his brother.
Of course, he couldn’t buy an engagement ring. And here she is now, sitting in her living room and watching these two boys, these two brothers, on her TV, staring at the way they look at each other, like no one exists at this moment but them, before the younger one seemingly reluctantly returns to his microphone and starts to sing the next song.
And she listens to him sing about love and longing; she sees the way his older brother looks at him from his place next to him on stage, sees his eyes that are incapable of hiding his emotions, and she knows she will never speak to anyone about the day this young man came into her shop and bought the ring.
This young man, who couldn’t buy an engagement ring, even though he might have wanted to. But as she looks at them, she suspects these two treat this ring as if it were an engagement ring anyway.
Because for them, it holds the same promise of forever.