As a child, I grew up surrounded by beauty. Before I could read, Dad taught me to recognize precious stones, pouring glittering piles onto his desk and letting me examine them through a loupe. I remember the bright clatter as gems spilled from the tiny, white paper packets he kept tucked inside his suit jacket. After he died, my connection to that world, which had shaped my earliest memories, fell away.
Years later, I set out to track down his greatest creation: a multi-million-dollar jeweled egg that had destroyed our family. At first, I was driven by a single question: Why had my father, Paul Kutchinsky, risked everything—his century-old jewelry firm, his marriage, and, ultimately, his life—to make it? But as my research stretched across decades and continents, other questions took hold: How did such a thing come into being? Who were the hands that turned his ambition into a gold-and-diamond fever dream?
