Because that's exactly what Rose would say.
Exactly. Not gently. Not with careful, therapeutic language. Just— "Stop being idiots, you two."
And then she'd make coffee and act like the whole thing was settled because to Rose, love was simple. You just did it. You showed up and you chose it and you didn't make it complicated.
I look at the ring. At Bex. At the ring.
Her hands are still around mine. Calloused. Scarred. Strong enough to bend iron and gentle enough to hold a man's breaking heart without flinching.
She's not asking me to do this.
She's never asked.
Not once—not in the tack room, not in the stall, not in any of the moments where the ring pressed against her skin and they both felt the ghost between them.
She held my hand with the ring on it and never said a word.
That's why I can do this. Because she didn't demand it. Because the choice is mine.
I close my eyes, take a breath that starts at the bottom of my lungs and fills every hollow space in my chest.
Slowly. So slowly. I slide the ring off my finger.
The sensation is?—
I don't have words for it.
Years of constant contact, and now the air touches skin that hasn't been bare since the day Rose put the ring on my hand.
The groove is deep. The tan line is stark.
My finger feels naked in a way that radiates up my arm and into my chest and settles somewhere behind my sternum like a second heartbeat.
It feels like losing her all over again.
The grief and the relief so tangled together I can't tell where one ends and the other begins, and maybe that's the point.
Maybe that's what healing is—not the absence of pain but the presence of something else alongside it.
Something that makes the pain bearable.
Something that makes the breathing possible.
I hold the ring in my palm. Small. Warm from my skin. Scratched and worn and perfect.
"I want to give it to Earl." My voice is steady. Somehow. "She was his before she was mine."
Bex's face crumples. Not the breakdown—the release.
The way a face looks when something held too tightly is finally set down.
She presses her forehead to my bare hand—the left one, the ringless one—and I feel her tears on my knuckles. Hot. Real.
I set the ring on the nightstand. It sits in the early light, catching gold, a small circle holding an entire life inside it.
And then I reach for her.
My bare hand on her face.
