Page 46 of Blueline Baby

The jeweler takes the ring under a bright halo light.

“My grandma wore that every day for fifty years,” I tell him. I have no idea why I say it.

“She may have, but it’s significantly older than that.” He turns it over with a tiny pair of tweezers. “This is platinum, and that’s an old European cut. Look here.”

He tips it toward me. I look at it. I see absolutely nothing.

“This ring was made somewhere around the late nineteen-twenties.”

“That’s not right. My grandmother got married in the fifties.”

“Then it belonged to someone before her.” He shrugs, like guys bring century-old diamonds into his shop every day.

“Okay,” I say. “So. Can you make the diamond bigger?”

Lorelei makes a strangled sound right beside me. I glance down at her. “What? I’m asking a logistical question.”

“You’re asking a horrible question.”

“It’s not that big of a diamond.” I look at the jeweler for backup. He offers absolutely none. “I’m not saying it’s too small. I’m saying I want her to have something…” I stop abruptly. Lorelei is standing there with her eyebrows raised so high they’re disappearing into her hairline.

“You can absolutely put a larger stone in it,” the jeweler says calmly. “But you’d lose the setting.”

“What if we did that, then? Something simpler. Cleaner.” I point blindly at the engraved metal running down the sides. “All this stuff on the sides. Can you just take all that off?”

Lorelei slaps her hand flat on the glass counter.

“Jack. Oh my God.” I look at her. “Your mother didn’t give you a priceless vintage family heirloom so you could rip it all apart.”

“That’s not what I’m trying to do.”

Lorelei picks up the ring. She holds it right in front of my face so I have to look at it. “Chloe isn’t going to want a boring, plain band with a massive, gaudy rock on it. She wants the thing that your grandmother wore for fifty years, with all the details still perfectly intact. Do not modernize one single bit of it.”

The jeweler, who has clearly been waiting for permission to weigh in, says, “I’d agree with her.”

Dean laughs. “Everybody agrees with her. It's because she’s always right.”

So we leave the damn ring alone. The jeweler measures Chloe’s silver ring and writes a bunch of numbers down. He tells me the platinum has to be sized, two of the prongs are worn dangerously thin and need to be fixed, and I can pick it up in exactly two weeks.

I didn’t plan on feeling like these two weeks were a countdown to something inevitable. Like every single moment between now and picking up that ring is an opportunity for me to accidentally blurt out exactly what I’m planning.

I manage to drop Chloe’s ring back into the little ceramic dish when I go over to her apartment that night. I think I’m completely home free. Until she walks into her bedroom, sees me standing frozen in front of her dresser, and stops short, tilting her head.

“Hi,” I say casually. Too casually.

She looks past me at her dresser. Then back at my face. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you break something?”

“Why does everyone always assume—no.”

She crosses the room and my entire life flashes in front of my eyes.

Then she walks right past the dresser entirely. She sits down heavily on the edge of the bed and starts pulling off her shoes.

Holy shit. I’m actually going to get away with this.