Page 233 of One of Those Amnesia Stories

He told me some time ago about the ring in his pocket that day. About the months he’d carried it, waiting for the right moment. About the way his hand had brushed the box every time he reached for my hand. About how he’d almost given it to me a hundred times before I beat him to it.

We were both so silly. Both so afraid. Both reaching for the same thing in the dark, not knowing the other was reaching too.

I took the ring out of the box. It was warm in my palm. Gold and brown diamonds were scattered across the band, catching the light—the same brown as his eyes, the same gold that flickered there when he looked at me.

“I love you so fucking much,” he said. His voice was wrecked. “I don’t deserve you.”

I touched his hand on my waist. Removed it gently. Held it in front of me. He was still wearing his wedding band—the one I had put on his finger in a courthouse years ago. He had never taken it off. Not once. Even when I had forgotten him.

“You do.” I slid the ring onto his finger. Gold and diamonds settling against his skin. “We both deserve each other.”

He looked down at his hand. At the ring I’d given him. At the ring he’d never stopped wearing.

Then he reached for my hand and slid my ring back onto my finger.

It was the same ring.

But now, when I turned my hand in the light, something caught my eye.

My breath stopped.

Between the stones. In the spaces he had left, the small gaps that separated each diamond.

Words.

Etched so fine they looked like scratches at first, like the metal had caught on something. But when I brought my hand closer, when I let the light hit just right, I could see them.

In his handwriting.

The one I had seen on a thousand sticky notes left on the counter, on the little drawings he’d leave on my mirror when I was running late, on the little notes he tucked into my bag before work that I pretended not to find until I was already in the car.

I love you.

He had carved them into the place where only I would feel them. Where they would sit against my finger every day, hidden from the world, pressed close to my skin—a secret only I would ever know.

So that’s what he was doing.

I’d wondered why the ring disappeared from the nightstand where I kept it when I went to sleep. Why he kissed my head so softly when he thought I was already asleep.

He lifted my hand to his mouth and pressed a kiss to the ring. Then to my palm. Then to my lips.

It was perfect.

Walking down the aisle to him was perfect too.

His eyes moved over me slowly, drinking in the dress, my hair, the flowers gathered in my hands. Then they settled on my face.

On my smile.

On the tears I hadn’t bothered to hide.

He didn’t look away once.

Then his hands moved.

The words he had learned to say with his hands before he could say them with his voice.

I love you.