Éric Gasté’s illustrations are the highlight of the book. They are bright, expressive, and full of movement.

"Do not cling to your radiance, Celia, for it is in letting go that you will find true freedom. Your light will dance across the fabric of space, leaving behind a trail of stardust that will seed the birth of new worlds. In this surrender, you will discover the infinite within yourself, and your essence will become one with the universe."

In the depths of space, a small, shimmering diamond remained, a testament to Celia's existence. It held the secrets of the universe, a microcosm of the cosmos, and the essence of a being who had shone brightly, if only for a moment. The diamond whispered a profound truth: that it is in the impermanence of life that we find its true value, and that the beauty of existence lies in its ephemeral brilliance.

But sometimes, late at night, when the shop bell chimes and the rain taps the window, she looks at her reflection in the glass and sees a woman who is not soft. Not anymore.

Celia looked down at the stone in her hand. It was perfect. Blue as deep water. Flawless. But she knew her mother’s games. If she said it was a copy, it was a copy—or it wasn’t. The uncertainty was the weapon.

The Cœur de la Mer was a fifty-carat, internally flawless, deep-blue diamond rumored to have been cut from a stone that once adorned a Mughal emperor’s throne. It was kept in a vault beneath the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo. The vault was a masterpiece: biometric locks, seismic sensors, a laser web so dense that a moth couldn’t cross it. It was, everyone said, unstealable.

Over the next decade, Celia le Diamant became a ghost. She stole the Soleil d’Afrique from a moving train between Pretoria and Cape Town. She lifted the Briolette of Bombay from a Saudi prince’s yacht in the Greek isles, replacing it with a flawless cubic zirconia she’d cut herself. She never sold everything. Some stones she kept in a felt-lined drawer beneath her floorboards, just to touch them in the dark and feel the weight of what she’d won.

She walked up to her mother, pressed the diamond into her palm, and said, “Keep it. You’ve always needed things more than I have.”