‘That he was a complete douche?’ She sits down next to me, folding her legs neatly.
I wipe my nose. ‘He’s not a douche. Not really.’ I meet her green eyes. ‘He was everything. We had everything.’
My finger gently slides across the ticket for an opera we’d seen on a whim to get the full Italian experience, despite neither of us liking opera. We’d narrated quietly through the whole thing, both of us making each other laugh behind our hands with our translations. We’d walked back to the hotel, tipsy on Chianti, singing all of the directions operatically.
I’d loved journaling our life together. Each page has dates and days written in calligraphy and Insta-worthy embellishments, dried flowers, scraps of pretty paper behind the Polaroid photos from the camera he’d bought me for Christmas.
‘He thought his career was more important than you. So he is most certainly a douche.’
I lean my head against her shoulder, reaching for my jewellery box. I take a deep breath and open it. Each pair of earrings, each bracelet, has its own memory: a Sunday picnic, a meeting where we pitched another killer idea, a brooch I’d picked out from a flea market… the bracelet with charms from birthdays and Christmases long gone, but not forgotten. The last three years of my life is in this box. I rifle through the contents, Josie quiet as I excavate through my past. I move things around again, panic pulling my face closer to the contents.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asks, sensing the shift.
‘My engagement ring. It’s missing.’
‘You sure?’
I sit up more urgently. ‘Yes, I put it in here…’ I run my finger along the velvet lining, my fingers hitting the bottom of the crease. I upend the box, the contents scattering. ‘It’s missing.’
Josie picks up the box and does another sweep.
‘Do you think he kept it?’ she asks.
‘Why would he…?’ My voice trails off. I feel like my body has been sliced in two.
‘It was his grandmother’s,’ I say with understanding. Of course he took it back.
I picture him handing it to me. It wasn’t a grand proposal. There wasn’t an audience. We weren’t in Paris or on a gondola. He wasn’t a cliché. We had been writing. And he’d pushed it along the desk. I hadn’t noticed it at first; I was engrossed, researching true-crime podcasts. Ryan’s argument was that it was verging on voyeurism and I was trying to prove it was simply curiosity that gripped listeners. We’d thrown out counter-arguments while we wrote – people are inherently good from me, people are born savages and it’s only social constructs that stop us following our inner desires from him. He didn’t reallybelieve it, but it made for tantalising clickbait. It turned out to be one of our hard hitters; the online comments had run into the hundreds of thousands. When I’d looked up, he’d been writing too. ‘What’s this?’ I picked it up.
‘It’s yours.’ He’d stopped typing. I’d looked up, the small laughter lines around his eyes deepening. ‘I want to do this. With you. For the rest of my life. I can’t imagine life being any better than this. Right now.’
I’d picked it up and slipped it on my finger. Then we’d carried on writing, both of us with ridiculous grins on our faces until we’d hit our word count. He’d walked around to me, took my hand in his, kissed where the ring fit almost perfectly. ‘I take it that’s a yes?’
Josie had been furious at the lack of effort; she had her own engagement all worked out in advance. A string quartet, and I think there was a mention of doves and possibly Michael Bublé singing in the background. The real one, not a recording. But I’d just said that it was perfect. And it was.
‘He’d said he couldn’t imagine his life being any better than writing with me in our house on a rainy Thursday afternoon. That when he walked into a room, the only person he wanted to see was me.’ And honestly, that’s how it always felt. No matter how big a party, no matter how busy a meeting, our eyes would find each other’s right from the very first day we met. ‘Not any more, it seems.’ I don’t say out loud that I still scan the passengers on a train, the customers in a supermarket and expect to see him cocking a smile at me.
‘Twat,’ Josie says, biting down on the edge of the word. I lean into her, letting the memories fall away, but they reform, another woman wearing the ring that sat on my finger for two years. Another face he looks for in the crowd.
A thought lands. I sit up. Urgent. ‘Wait…’ I get up and rush from the room.
‘Al, where are you going?!’
I hurry down the stairs and into the lounge where my crime scene still decorates the wall. I pull the letter off the wall and scan the words. Josie appears, taking in the manic state of me. I hand over the letter. ‘He found a ring!’
‘What?’
‘A ring! Look!’ I run my finger under his words.First thing I should mention is I have your ring; you must have dropped it.
‘Al… this doesn’t mean that…’ She looks to the wall, to me, to the letter, eyebrows drawing in.
She pauses then hits me with a concerned smile.
‘I’m losing my marbles, aren’t I?’
‘Noooo…’ she says, shaking her head slowly. ‘But I think you’ve had a shock and…’
She walks over to the sofa, sits down and taps the space next to her. I join her, still clutching the letter in my hands like it has the answers to my future. ‘Why don’t you take some time off, eh?’
