I could deal with that, and I nodded toward the box. "Open it."
Her forehead crinkled, not pleased with my barked order, but she tore into the container. There was a velvet pouch inside, a robin's egg blue one emblazoned with a Newbury Street jeweler's name, and that sent both eyebrows up.
"What's this?" she asked, loosening the ties.
I didn't answer, instead watching while she upended the pouch's contents into her palm. She pinched the ring between her thumb and forefinger, staring at the narrow strip of diamonds on platinum.
"There's probably something unwise about picking out diamonds for a geologist, but—"
"No," she interrupted, her eyes still focused on the band. "Not unwise. Not at all."
"You don't have to say that," I continued. "I just didn't want you going to the North Pole without a ring."
Her shoulders shook as she laughed. "Are you worried about the research station hook-up scene? Even if I wasn't married, and long past the hook-up phase of my life, I wouldn't be giving Arctic Sea researchers a second glance. I have to share some cramped quarters with them for two months, and I don't want them giving me the smarms."
"I wasn't worried aboutthat," I said. "It hit me that my wife's been walking around without a ring, and that's a problem."
"So we're doing this," she mused, still studying the band. "We're being married now. It's real."
I took a sip from my water bottle before responding. "What've we been doing the past few months, darlin'?"
Erin rolled her eyes and held up the ring as if it could make her point for her. "Have you told your parents?"
I scratched my chin while I thought that through. "Do you want me to? I don't think I've even told them that I took the job at Mass Gen," I said. "If you want me to do that, I will, although I'd rather take you to Dallas and introduce you the right way."
Erin nodded slowly. "See what I mean? Your family doesn't know, my family doesn't know, it's just us and this little experiment."
"About that," I said, gesturing toward her. "Riley knows."
She blew out the longest, loudest sigh I'd ever heard, and then stared at me, stone-faced. "Of course he does," she said.
I started to explain, but then Erin slipped the ring onto her finger. A bolt of adrenaline spread through my body, warm and light like bubbles in my bloodstream, and I smiled. It was loose, and she moved it to her middle finger.
"I guess I'll have to grow into it," she said.
And that was our marriage, right there in a single breath. It didn't belong to tradition, and we were still trying to make it fit.
Was it strange that my wife lived on another continent, and neither of us could make moves to change that? Sure.
Was it odd that we'd been married for months, and neither of our families knew anything about it? Definitely, but it was worth noting that our families were also odd.
Was it possible that this would go up in flames and leave us burnt and broken? Absolutely.
Was it also possible that we'd uncover the path that made this work for both of us? Yeah, and that was what made this chaos worthwhile.
Chapter Fifteen
Nick
Christmas Eve was brutal.It started with an unpleasant call to my parents, both of whom seemed miserable for reasons of their own creation. They couldn't remember what they liked about each other but had little interest in confronting that issue, and the consequences bore themselves out in an assortment of misplaced hostilities. My mother was forever hiring and firing decorators or contractors, none of them ever up to par. My father spent all of his hours on horses, often traveling hither and yonder to find his next great beast. Dallas society and charity events were too busy, or not busy enough, or whichever private club they belonged to was being impossible again. And I lived in Boston, which I couldn't be bothered to leave for even one holiday a year.
Insert eye roll.
Going home was nothing more than an invitation for my parents to complain about each other to me, and it drove me crazy that they were unhappy together but were content to piss and moan their days away instead of changing anything. The most annoying part was that my family didn't haverealissues. They had old, middling issues that lent themselves to passive-aggression and side-taking. When I considered that alongside Erin's family, and the abuse and neglect she endured after her mother died, I was even more annoyed.
Home hadn't been the same since my grandmother passed away during my senior year at UT-Austin. She'd never understood my mother's world of big oil money, and she didn't understand my sisters' interests in pageants and debutante balls, but we understood each other. My grandmother taught me how to care for every living thing on the ranch. I'd delivered more than a dozen foals before I was ten years old, and I knew how to suture cuts, treat scorpion stings, and diagnose common ailments before I was fifteen.
My grandmother was known locally as a healer, a medicine woman who always had a handmade salve or potion at the ready. She traveled between ranches and migrant camps, always checking on someone and bringing a balm to someone else and asking after so-and-so with the stomach pains. She delivered babies and performed rudimentary surgery, ministered to the sick and dying and shouted at ranchers to take better care of their people.
