One day in Ventura, California, Jonell McLain saw a beautiful diamond necklace in a jewelry store window and wondered: Why are personal luxuries so plentiful yet accessible to so few? What if we shared what we desired? Several weeks, dozens of phone calls, and one great leap of faith later, Jonell and twelve other women bought the necklace together–to be passed along among them all. The dazzling treasure weaves in and out of each woman’s life, reflecting her past, defining her present, making promises for her future. Lending sparkle in surprising and unexpected ways, the necklace comes to mean something dramatically different to each of the thirteen women. With vastly dissimilar histories and lives, they transcend their individual personalities and politics to join together in an uncommon journey–and what started as a quirky social experiment becomes something far richer and deeper. “Inspirational . . . The best way to honor the book’s principles is to share your copy with a friend.”— New York Times “ The Necklace is a fascinating journey into thirteen women’s lives. Sweet and touching, it also manages to make you think about what really matters in life.”—Kathie Lee Gifford “Original and beautifully crafted . . . How this piece of jewelry transformed the lives of the participants is the subject of a highly readable book that is part memoir, part metaphor and all charm.”— Tucson Citizen “This moving book profiles a remarkable social experiment, where friendships and beliefs are uncovered and found to be just as strong as the stones being passed from neck to neck.”— Redbook “[A] must-have book . . . The Necklace could as easily have been titled The Sisterhood of the Traveling Diamonds.”— New York Daily News “A feel-good and thought-provoking book.”— BookPage “A gem of a story sparkles under The Necklace .”— St. Louis Post-Dispatch Cheryl Jarvis is a journalist and essayist and the author of The Marriage Sabbatical: The Journey That Brings You Home . Her byline has appeared in numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune , Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and Reader’s Digest. A former television producer and magazine and newspaper editor, she has taught writing at the University of Southern California and at Washington University and Webster University in St. Louis. CHAPTER ONE Jonell McLain, The Visionary Making an idea happen ... Jonell McLain was sitting at her desk looking at the piles of paper surrounding her, struggling not to feel overwhelmed. She wondered why she could never clear her desk, never cross off the forty-five tasks on her to-do list. Were there always forty-five things on that list? It sure seemed so. She felt like Sisyphus, the king in the Greek legend who was condemned to push the same rock up a mountain, over and over. Some days she felt like all she accomplished was moving piles. Some papers she could swear she moved a hundred times. Part of the problem was that she was full of ideas, so she was continually adding projects to the list. Executing them, well, that was a skill she hadn’t yet mastered. Today, the list didn’t make her queasy as it often did. She’d just finished a deal on a house and so was feeling the high that real estate agents feel when they finally receive their big commission checks. This one represented three months of work and emotional exhaustion. People bought homes when they were undergoing major life transitions, so naturally they were on edge. The shock of prices on the West Coast made those buyers moving to California especially anxious. Because the work was so stressful, Jonell always rewarded herself after each closing. She hadn’t decided what to buy herself this time, so she headed to the mall just to buy her clients a box of See’s candy, part of the gift basket she’d have welcoming them to their new home. The Pacific View Mall was the only mall in Ventura, a California beach town sixty miles north of Los Angeles. Jonell moved her wiry frame quickly through the dusty-pink shopping enclave, stopping only to glance in the window of Van Gundy & Sons, a decades-old, family- owned jewelry store, the Tiffany’s of Ventura. Usually Jonell’s glances were as quick as her strides, but this time she stopped. She stared. In the center display case a diamond necklace glittered against black velvet. A few years earlier she’d searched unsuccessfully for a simple rhinestone necklace to wear to a formal event. Now here it was, the exact one she’d had in mind. She recognized the style as the necklace version of the tennis bracelet, so dubbed after tennis champion Chris Evert lost her diamond bracelet during the 1987 U.S. Open and stopped the match to search for it. The diamonds were strung in a single strand all the way to the clasp, the center diamond the largest, the two closest to the clasp the smallest. The gradations were minuscule, the effect breathtaking. But this was Van Gundy’s. There was no way this ne