Time has no borders except those people make. On this particularly cold autumn day, Ishikawa Hana fashioned that border out of the thinnest layer of skin. Eyelids were useful that way. Because as long as she kept her eyelids shut, she could keep the two halves of her life apart: the twenty-­one years she had lived before she opened her eyes, and all that was going to happen next.

She pulled her blanket over her head and pretended that her hungover first morning as the pawnshop’s new owner had yet to begin. It didn’t matter that she was now wide awake, that the last of a tangled string of dreams she could not remember had unraveled more than an hour ago. Her head felt heavier and her mouth drier than usual, but she figured that this was less on account of the alcohol she’d had the night before than on what awaited her.

In a few moments, her father, Toshio, was going to knock on her door to start their day.

Hana insisted on clinging to the tiny hope that the unwise amount of sake they had celebrated his retirement with was going to keep him in bed a little longer. This hope—­if it indeed could be called hope given its size—­was smaller than a mossy river pebble and just as slippery.

In all the years that the pawnshop had been in Toshio’s charge, there were only two occasions when it had not opened on time. On both those days, it had not opened at all. But Hana and her father didn’t talk about those two days. Ever.

If their pawnshop were like other ordinary pawnshops that traded in diamonds, silver, and gold, the Ishikawa family, who had run the pawnshop for generations, might have had the luxury of sick days and weekends. But Toshio had trained Hana to appraise far more valuable treasure.