Chapter 21: The Ring in the Rain

Dominic's POV

Gemma had put her mouth against my ear and said, third curve, the Madonna's feet.

Then she had said the rest.

I left my wife a note on the pillow that said the club books would keep me two days.

It was the second lie I had told her.

I told myself it was for a good reason.

The third curve above the Amalfi tunnel was empty in the rain.

The sea had gone gray below the guardrail, and a wet wind pulled at my coat.

The road had been repaired.

There were no skid marks, no glass, nothing.

On the inside of the bend, set into the rock, stood a little roadside shrine with a tin roof.

The Madonna inside was painted plaster, the size of a loaf of bread.

Dead flowers lay at her feet, and someone had left a plastic rosary.

I knelt on the wet gravel and moved the flowers aside.

Beneath her, in a gap in the plaster where the paint had cracked, something small and dull caught the light.

I put two fingers into the gap and drew it out.

A gold wedding band.

Plain and worn thin on the inside where it had rested against a finger for thirty years.

I turned it to the gray light and read the inside.

A small seahorse, and a date.

I closed my hand around it and stayed there, kneeling, with the rain running down the back of my neck.

Gemma's words came back to me whole.

Bring it to her yourself, and she'll love you for the ring. You'll never know if it was you.

She had meant it as a knife.

She had thought I would carry the ring to Ila.

She had wanted every kind look I earned afterward to taste like her.

I stood up, and I put the ring in my breast pocket, and buttoned it.

I wasn't going to take it to Ila.

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