New Husband. Old One Gone novel · Chapter 15 of 32

Chapter 15: The Ring

I looked at that picture until the screen went dark in my hand.

Then I woke it up and looked again.

Sawyer took the phone out of my fingers and set it face down on the counter.

"Come to bed, Ro."

I went.

I lay there till one in the morning with my eyes open, listening to the radiator tick and to him trying to breathe.

At ten after one I got up, put on his flannel shirt and a pair of his socks, and took my laptop downstairs.

The ballroom was dark and huge.

The Ropewalk keeps a projector on a cart for wedding slideshows. Baby pictures, mostly. Prom photos.

I rolled it out to the middle of the heart-pine floor and pointed it at the white wall at the end.

I plugged in the laptop.

Then I put Jesse's time up on a wall twenty feet wide.

Green light filled the whole end of the room.

I sat cross-legged on the floor in front of it and went through it one frame at a time.

There are thirty frames in a second. A ten-second clip is three hundred pictures.

I looked at every one.

The speedometer. The dash. Her knuckles. The shake of the cab.

"Inconclusive," I said out loud, to nobody.

The word bounced off the brick.

By two I had the frames where she turns the wheel memorized.

Her hand goes up and over, quick and showy.

And the ring turns with it.

For four frames, the face of the ring swings toward the dash lights.

I stopped on the first one and blew it up.

It went to mush.

I backed it down a size. I tried the second frame. The third.

On the fourth frame, the light hit it square.

It was a big gold ring with a dark oval stone.

On one shoulder, raised in the gold, there was a crest. An eagle with its wings out, over an anchor.

On the other shoulder there were two numbers.

I knew those numbers.

I'd read them three hours ago, under a picture of a woman in a blue gown.

I grabbed my phone off the floor.

I pulled up Lauren's picture and spread it with two fingers until her hand on Bryce's arm filled the screen.

Gold. Dark oval stone. An eagle over an anchor.

I pulled up the battalion's web page. The officers had little bios with their pictures.

Captain Lauren Spivey, United States Naval Academy.

The class year was right there under her name.

The same two numbers.

I held the phone up next to the wall.

Her hand at the ball. Her hand on the wheel.

The same ring, twenty feet wide, on a white brick wall.

"Ro?"

I turned around.

Sawyer was at the bottom of the stairs in gray sweatpants and an old T-shirt, his hair standing up on one side.

He had two mugs of coffee.

"I heard the projector fan," he said. "Figured it was you or a burglar who likes slideshows."

I couldn't talk.

I pointed at the wall.

He came across the floor slow and stood next to me and looked at it.

Then he looked at my phone.

He looked back and forth three times.

"That's her ring," he said quietly.

"That's her ring."

"In the truck."

"On the wheel." My voice wasn't steady. "They said it could be anybody's hand. It's not anybody's hand, Sawyer. It's hers. She wears it every day of her life."

He set the coffee down on the floor.

He didn't hug me.

He sat down next to me cross-legged on the heart pine, close enough that his knee touched mine, and looked at the wall with me.

"Show me again," he said. "Slow."

I showed him.

Frame by frame. The hand going up. The ring turning. The fourth frame.

When I froze it, he whistled through his teeth.

"Gwaltney," he said. "You're terrifying."

I laughed, and it came out wet.

He handed me my coffee.

We sat there and drank it, two people in socks on a ballroom floor at half past two, staring at a gold ring.

I took screenshots of all four frames. I emailed them to myself. I emailed them to Mama. I put them in three different folders.

Then I shut the laptop.

The wall went white, then dark.

Only the string of bare bulbs was on now, the ones he'd hung for the dock wedding. They made little warm circles down the middle of the room.

I set down my mug.

Sawyer was watching me.

He'd been watching me the whole time, I realized. Not the wall. Me.

"What?" I said.

"Nothing. You just did a thing a whole Marine Corps inquiry couldn't do, in my socks."

I looked down at my feet.

Then I got up on my knees and took his face in my hands.

"Say I'm right," I said.

"You're right."

"Say it again."

"You're right, Ro." His hands came up to my waist under the flannel. "You've been right since the hotel. They've spent two weeks calling you a grieving girl and you've been right the whole time."

I kissed him.

Two weeks of "inconclusive" went into it.

He made a sound low in his chest and pulled me down into his lap, right there on the floor.

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