Chapter 11: The Ring

I let her in.

She stood in the middle of Dorinda's little living room.

She looked at the quilt on the couch and the photo of me in the reading glasses.

"You look like a raccoon in that," she said.

"Everyone says that."

She didn't smile.

She set the ring box on the coffee table between us and sat down on the very edge of the couch.

"I asked him about the ring," she said. "After dinner. After Mom went upstairs."

"What did he say?"

"That he saved for it. That he'd been saving since the day he met me." She pressed her lips together.

"Then he went to shower, and I went down to his car to get my sunglasses."

She took a folded card out of her sweatshirt pocket and put it on top of the box.

A thank-you card from a jeweler in Houston, the kind they tuck into the bag.

Thank you for your purchase.

It was addressed to Saltmarsh Holdings.

"I know what Saltmarsh is," Vanessa said. "I heard you at the fitting. I pretended I didn't."

"Van."

"Just tell me," she said. "Don't be nice. Just tell me."

I got my laptop from the spare room and sat down beside her.

She watched me log in.

Her knee was bouncing, the way it did before her piano recitals when she was ten.

The jeweler's name took me thirty seconds to find.

December nineteenth, eighty-six thousand dollars, paid from a Bellweather account.

The account the hotel used to hold the staff's pension money until it went to the fund.

That December the money never went to the fund.

Eighty-six thousand of it went to Houston, to a jeweler, for a ring.

I turned the screen so she could see it.

She didn't need me to.

She read it once.

Then she looked down at her own left hand, at the stone.

"He proposed on Christmas Eve," she said. "In the lobby. In front of Daddy. Everybody clapped."

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