Page 15

“Your deed,” Blair says. “So we can establish legal ownership of the cryptid before the festival committee sees him.”

“You are not getting a percentage of my wicker bear.”

Blair folds her arms. “Then I’m withdrawing as counsel.”

Inside, the cottage feels unnaturally quiet after the fire and five women talking over one another. I use the bathroom, wash my hands, pull on sweatpants instead of shorts, and then collect napkins and five bottles of water from the kitchen.

When I open the junk drawer for the little flashlight I keep there, I see the ceramic dish shoved toward the back. My wedding ring is in it.

My hand stops above the drawer. I took the ring off nine months ago, but my fingers still know its shape. I pick it up. The gold is cool against the pad of my thumb, lighter than I expect, so small that I can hide thirteen years by closing my hand.

For a while, I carried it in my purse because I couldn’t stand the thought of wearing it and couldn’t quite make myself leave it behind. Later I put it in this dish and stopped opening the drawer unless I needed batteries or a takeout menu. None of that matters as much as the way my thumb finds the inside edge now and starts to turn it.

The old motion is automatic. Under restaurant tables, in somebody else’s dining room, in the passenger seat while he drove, I used to rotate the ring whenever I knew I’d done something he wouldn’t like. Once around. Then again. A tiny circle under the table while I waited to find out whether I’d laughed too loudly or said too much or embarrassed him in some way I hadn’t understood yet. My thumb makes half a turn before I catch it.

I hold the ring still between my fingers. The skin at the base of my finger feels strangely bare even though it’s been bare for nine months, and a faint ache runs through the hand that used to hide beneath tables. I expect the ring to bring something heavier with it. Grief. Rage. Thirteen years compressed into gold. Instead, I’m standing in my kitchen holding something that weighs almost nothing.

The red lamp is waiting at Calhoun’s. The cottage is full of things I picked because I liked them. There are multiple locks on my doors and a gun in my bedroom, and I still check the camera before I go to sleep. It’s a lot of work, being your own protection.

I remember the first night in this cottage, waking six times because every branch against the roof sounded like someone outside. For years, footsteps in the hallway after I’d gone to bed meant I was about to be awake again. Trent would come in with something I’d done wrong, something I’d said, some argument he wasn’t finished having. I learned to listen to how hard he walked and how fast he was coming.

Then I glance through the kitchen window at the fire.

“Oh, why the hell not?” I close my fingers around the ring, gather the napkins and water, and take everything outside.

I set everything on the table, still holding the ring between two fingers.

Blair notices it almost immediately. “Oh.”

Shannon follows her eyes. “Is that…?”

“Yep.”

Laura looks at my face rather than the ring. “What are you doing?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“That’s reassuring,” Blair says.

I walk to the fire. When I open my hand, the ring settles into the center of my palm, warm from my skin. For one second my thumb wants to turn it again, but I keep my hand still.

Shannon comes to stand beside me. “You don’t have to do anything dramatic.”

“I know.”

“You could sell it,” Blair offers.

Janet says, “You could have it made into something else.”

Laura says nothing, which helps most.

I look at the flames. “Gold doesn’t burn, does it?”

“Not in a bonfire,” Blair says.

“Naturally, you know that.”

“I paid attention in high school.”