I forgot I had put it there. Not forgot exactly. Buried. I couldn’t keep it on my hand, couldn’t throw it away, couldn’t give it to anyone. So I slipped it into the drawer beneath a silk scarf and pretended the decision could wait.
Now it lies in Yaromir’s hand, glittering under the bedroom light.
He looks at it like it’s a wound.
“I’m sorry,” I say quickly. “I didn’t know where else to put it.”
His fingers close around the ring.
Not hard enough to crush it. Hard enough that I imagine the diamonds cutting into his palm.
“This was hers,” he says.
His voice is so quiet that I almost don’t hear it.
“What?”
“This ring belonged to my mother.”
This’s the last thing I expected him to say.
“What was her name?” I ask.
His eyes stay on the ring. “Mila.”
Mila. The name feels too soft for this room, for him, for the Volkovs.
“She wore it always,” he says. “Not because of Kirill. Not after she understood what he was. She wore it because it belonged to her mother before her. It was one of the few things she had that did not come from him.”
I say nothing. I’m afraid if I speak too soon, he’ll stop.
Yaromir turns the ring slowly in his fingers. “When she got sick, she became thinner every month. Her hands changed first. The ring became too loose. I remember finding thread wrapped around the band so it wouldn’t slip off.” His jaw tightens.
“She still wore it?”
“Until the end.”
The words hit me in the chest. I look at the ring again, and for the first time it doesn’t look like an engagement ring. Not like Dmitri’s gift. Not like the pretty thing my friends admired by the pier.
It looks like something stolen from a dead woman’s hand.
My throat tightens. “How did Dmitri get it?”
Yaromir’s mouth twists. “Kirill took everything after she died. Papers. jewelry. photographs. Anything that connected her to him. I was nineteen. Dmitri must have stolen it, or my father gave it to him. Either way.”
“That’s cruel.”
“No,” he says. “Cruel would require him to think of my mother when he did it. He did not. To Kirill, this was only a ring from a box he had no use for.”
His voice stays controlled, but I can feel the anger beneath it.
I think of Dmitri sliding it onto my finger. His easy smile. The lunch by the pier. The women admiring it, Katya staring too long, me glowing under all that attention because I thought the ring meant I had been chosen.
I feel sick. “I wore it,” I whisper.
“You didn’t know.”
“I still wore it.”
