Chapter 3 The Ring

He came home that night and his wedding ring was gone.

I noticed it the way you notice a light that has been switched off in a room you weren't looking at — not immediately, but unmistakably, and with a chill that moves through you before you can name the reason.

"Your ring," I said.

He set his glass down. It slipped — I don't know if it was my question or the whiskey or sheer carelessness — and shattered against the edge of the counter. A shard caught my ankle. I felt the sting distantly, the way pain sometimes arrives with a delay.

Damiano stared at the space where his ring finger was bare.

"Where is it, Damiano?"

"It must have fallen off." He bent to pick up the glass shards, then stopped halfway and straightened. "I'll have Maria clean this up. And I'll compensate you for the ring."

"Compensate me."

"Whatever it cost. I'll have a new one made."

I looked at him for a long moment. "I designed that ring," I said. "I designed it myself, and I bought it with the first money I ever earned from selling a painting. Not your money. Not the family's money. Mine. I put it on your finger at our wedding and my hands were shaking."

He said nothing.

"You don't remember that, do you?"

"Norma—"

"Never mind." I turned toward the door. "It doesn't matter."

"I said I'd get you a new one."

I stopped walking. "Yes," I said, without turning around. "You always say that. Money fixes it. Money fixes everything. Except some things aren't things, Damiano."

The cold war that followed was quiet and total. I stopped running the household. I stopped laying out his suits in the morning, stopped coordinating the kitchen schedule, stopped attending Luca's after-school activities. Maria stepped in with admirable calm. Damiano said nothing. Luca complained — once — and I told him he was old enough to manage his own schedule.

"That's not how this works," Luca said, at breakfast, his jaw set in his father's way.

"It is now," I said.

The Costa family dinner was Damiano's olive branch — his way of smoothing things over without acknowledging that anything needed smoothing. We drove to my parents' apartment in a car that felt pressurised, like a submarine.

My mother opened the door beaming. "Damiano! You work so hard and you still make time for us. Sit, sit — I made broth."

Damiano hated broth. He drank it anyway and told my father the latest instalment of funding had been wired. My parents glowed.

In the car afterward, he leaned toward me. "Happy now? You wanted a family dinner — you got one. Stop pouting."

"My father asked you for money again, didn't he?"

"That's between me and Victor."

"He is my father."

"And I am your husband, and I handle this family's finances. You don't need to concern yourself with it."

We were almost at the manor when I said: "In eight years, have you ever once asked me what I want? Not what my family wants from you. Not what the family expects of me. What I, Norma, want from my own life?"

The gates opened automatically as we pulled into the drive. He didn't answer until the car had stopped and the engine had gone quiet.

"What you want," he said finally, in a tone that was almost gentle, "is not the relevant question. What matters is whether I choose to give it to you."

I opened my door and stepped out into the cold. Behind me, I heard him follow, but I didn't wait.

That sentence lived in my chest for days afterward. It told me everything I needed to know about the eight years I had just spent — and the time I had left.