Chapter 23: The Silver Bowl

Camille's POV

The woman at the donation table saw me coming and stood up.

She was gray-haired and sensible, in a navy dress, and she had run that table at every gala for twenty years.

"Ms. Winterbourne," she said, and her eyes went to the silver bowl.

"May I have what's in it?"

"I kept it for you." Her voice was low. "I didn't know whose it was to throw away. I put it in a tissue so it wouldn't scratch."

She lifted out a small folded square and set it in my palm.

The ring lay in the white paper, a plain gold band, worn on the inside where it had touched his finger.

I had picked it out myself.

I had picked it from a tray, in four minutes, between a call and a meeting, and told the jeweler to wrap it.

He had paid for it out of three years' savings.

He had worn it for two years and never once asked what I thought.

I closed my hand around it.

Then I turned to face the hall.

Two hundred people had stopped talking and were watching me.

Alana stood in the aisle in her headset.

Nolan stood at the end of it, by the fallen stage, with his hands at his sides.

He looked taller than I remembered.

The color had come back into his face.

A stranger would have said he was merely a handsome man in a good black suit.

I knew what it had cost him to stand there.

I walked back down the aisle between the tables.

Every head turned as I passed.

I had walked into rooms like this all my adult life with my chin raised.

Nobody in them had ever looked at me with pity.

They looked at me with pity now, and I let them.

I stopped three feet from him.

My heart was beating so hard it hurt.

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