The Ring He Stole

Chapter 3: The Call

Rosalind's POV

I stared at that message until the numbers on my phone blurred, three words sitting there in the dark like they were waiting for me to reach out.

Keep the card.

I didn't reply. I set the phone face down on the coffee table and went to shower instead, standing under water gone lukewarm long before I noticed, watching wine-colored rivulets run pink down the drain. I stayed under it longer than I needed to, long enough that my fingertips pruned, long enough to convince myself the water could do something the last two hours hadn't managed. By the time I climbed into bed the rain outside had stopped, and the apartment had gone that particular kind of quiet that only exists after midnight, when even the building's pipes stop ticking.

I didn't sleep so much as drift, the card propped against the lamp the whole night, its small cracked ring the last thing I saw before my eyes finally gave up and the first thing I saw when they opened again.

Morning came grey and unremarkable. I made coffee I didn't drink, let it go cold on the counter while I stood at the closet trying to remember how to dress for a day that had nothing to do with any of this, and dressed for work I barely remembered dressing for. Forty of Sebastian's texts sat unread on my lock screen by the time I made it out the door. My mother called once. I let it ring out. Some conversations needed more sleep than I'd gotten before I could survive having them.

Work moved around me like weather, present but unfelt. I said the right things in the right meetings, nodded at the right moments, signed off on a deck I couldn't have summarized five minutes after presenting it. Someone asked if I was feeling alright and I said I was just tired, which was true in the way that most true things are, technically correct and entirely beside the point. By the time I got home the sky had gone that flat, colorless white that comes before more rain, and Sebastian had texted forty more times, apology dressed as explanation, then anger dressed as concern.

I sat down on the couch with the card in my hand and let the apartment go dark around me instead of turning on a light, the city glowed through the window enough to see by, if I didn't look too closely at anything.

I didn't like being told what to do. Three years of marriage had cured me of tolerating that particular flavor of confidence in anyone but myself.

I picked up my phone.

I typed three different messages. Deleted all three. Typed a fourth, something short and sharp, deleted that too. Then I stopped typing entirely and called instead.

It rang twice.

I want my ring back.

A pause, brief enough that I might have imagined it.

No.

That's not your decision.

It's exactly my decision. I'm the one holding it.

You don't know me.

No.

Then stop acting like you do.

Silence again, longer this time. I could hear something faint in the background on his end, traffic, maybe, or wind moving through a space with high ceilings.

I don't need to know you to recognize what I saw Saturday, he said. That's not the same thing as pretending I know you.

Then why did you call me, if you already knew what I'd say?

I didn't have an answer ready, and the silence stretched long enough that I almost hung up out of pure embarrassment, phone hot against my ear, my own reflection faint in the dark window across the room.

Because I wanted to hear you say it, I finally admitted. Instead of reading it off a card.

Silence, again, different this time.

You're more honest in person than on paper, he said.

Another pause. I waited, not sure what I was waiting for.

Have dinner with me.

That surprised me more than anything else so far. That's not what I called for.

I'm aware. Consider it a separate request.

I have a husband. The word tasted wrong the second it left my mouth. I'm divorcing him.

I know.

Then you know how insane this sounds.

It sounds like an invitation to dinner. Nothing more than that. You can say no.

I opened my mouth to say no. What came out instead was, Why do you want to?

I watched you Saturday night, he said. I found myself wanting to know whether that woman still existed after you left the room.

What woman?

The one who set the ring down instead of throwing it.

I should have said no. I'd spent three years learning what it cost to say yes to things I didn't fully understand, and every instinct built from that should have told me to hang up, block the number, focus on issuing and surviving the divorce instead of adding a stranger to the wreckage.

I'll think about it, I said instead, and hung up before he could answer.

I sat there a long time afterward, the phone warm in my palm, staring at the cracked ring drawn on the card like it might finally tell me whether I'd just made the first good decision of the week or the worst one. The apartment had gone fully dark around me now, just the faint glow of the city coming through the window, and somewhere down the hall a door shut, footsteps, then silence again.

My phone buzzed. Not Kane. Sebastian's name, and beneath it, three words that made my stomach drop straight through the floor.

I'm standing outside now.

I went completely still on the couch, listening. Nothing at first, just the building's usual hum, a door somewhere down the hall, a car passing on the street below. Then the buzzer went off, sharp and sudden in the quiet apartment, loud enough that I flinched.

I didn't move to answer it.

It rang again. Longer this time, like whoever was leaning on it downstairs had run out of patience for waiting.

My phone buzzed a third time.

I know you're up there. I can see the light. Let me in, Rosalind. We need to talk about this like adults.

I looked toward the window, toward the thin gap in the curtains where a sliver of streetlight cut across the floor, and realized with a cold, sinking certainty that he was right. My lamp was on. He could see it from the street below, the one light in an otherwise dark building, proof that I was home and awake and simply choosing not to answer.

The buzzer went again, three short bursts this time, impatient, almost angry.

I stood up slowly, my phone still clutched in one hand, the card with its small cracked ring still in the other, and walked toward the window instead of the door, my bare feet silent against the hardwood, my own pulse loud enough to hear in the quiet.

I pulled back the edge of the curtain, just enough to see the street below.

Sebastian stood on the sidewalk outside my building, phone pressed to his ear, looking up directly at my window like he already knew exactly where I'd be standing. Rain had started again, fine and silver under the streetlights, and he hadn't bothered with an umbrella, hadn't bothered with anything except the phone still pressed to his ear and the collar of his coat turned up against the wet.

A second man stood several feet behind him beneath the awning. Too still. Hands in his coat pockets. Watching. Not me.

Sebastian.

He looked up. Tilted his head.

My phone buzzed again.

I didn't need to look at the screen though to know it wasn't Sebastian.