Love Is Gone, So Am I novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: Best Offer

I didn't cry over the bracelet.

I weighed it on Gus's scale instead.

"White gold," he said, without looking up from his bench. "Forty-two stones. Machine set. Retail's about six thousand. Somebody paid four."

"How do you know what he paid?"

"Because that's what men pay when they're in a hurry."

I wrote the tag at my own counter that afternoon, with the lake throwing light across the floorboards.

Sent to buy back a wife.

She isn't for sale.

The bracelet is: $3,200 or best offer.

I hung it in the front window on a bare branch of apple wood, right beside the veil.

Then I went back to my buckets.

Avis had given me every lilac in her yard and told me to stop asking.

I'd bought peonies and ranunculus from a grower outside Burlington with four hundred dollars of her check.

The shop smelled like a June wedding.

It was the first time in seven years I'd arranged flowers nobody had ordered.

I made them however I wanted.

Lilac in a cracked teapot. Peonies in a chipped silver trophy for a golf tournament in 1974.

On Saturday a woman got off the eleven o'clock ferry and stopped in front of my window.

She read the bracelet's tag.

She read it again.

Then she took out her phone and took a picture of it.

I didn't think about it until Sunday night, when my phone, which I had finally turned back on, started buzzing and didn't stop.

The picture was everywhere.

My tag. My handwriting.

Sent to buy back a wife.

A million people had seen it by Monday morning.

Most of them had opinions.

A lot of them were women.

A lot of the women had a bracelet, too.

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