Molly begins by recounting how, a few years earlier, Gran pressed a tarnished skeleton key into her hand from beneath a pillow, saying it was the key to her heart and to everything. Molly, who struggles to parse metaphor, repeatedly asked what lock it fit, but Gran—ailing and sometimes incoherent—offered no concrete answer. Shortly after insisting “It’s time,” Gran died, leaving Molly with the unexplained key and a chorus of Gran’s aphorisms echoing in her mind.

The scene jumps to the present where Molly, overwhelmed on the floor of the Regency Grand’s tearoom amid bright lights, cameras, and a crowd, hears reporters and the celebrity appraisers Brown and Beagle shouting that she is now an instant multimillionaire. Disoriented, she registers Juan Manuel’s concerned voice and the Bees’ questions before blacking out, wondering how the situation came to be.

The narrative then rewinds to that morning. Juan Manuel cheerfully wakes Molly for a busy day: Brown and Beagle’s Hidden Treasures event at the hotel where he is a chef and she is a maid. The couple, engaged and planning a modest city hall wedding they can barely afford, share a tender moment before rushing to prepare for work.

As they leave, Molly remembers they are invited to bring items for early appraisal. She collects Gran’s favorite chipped Royal Standard teacup, several souvenir spoons, a Swarovski swan, and the old skeleton key Gran gave her, hoping the appraisers might identify it. Juan urges her to also bring a bejeweled ornamental egg displayed in Gran’s curio cabinet.

Molly hesitates and internally reveals the egg’s origin: as a child working with Gran in the Grimthorpe mansion of an unhappy couple, she was captivated by the egg. Years later, after the owners’ deaths, a gardener who remembered her gifted the egg, calling it worthless. For Molly, the egg is a private reminder of what she and Gran endured, and she has told Juan little about that painful past.

Despite Molly’s belief that the egg is a mere trinket, Juan places it in the shoebox with the other items, quoting one of Gran’s sayings, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” which unsettles Molly because Gran’s phrases have been echoing in her head all morning. The chapter closes having set the stage for the appraisal that leads to the shocking revelation and Molly’s collapse under media attention.