It was not a ring.
She had seen it in his hand as he came into the kitchen and her heart had done something involuntary — not fear, not exactly, but the specific physical response of someone encountering a possibility they hadn’t quite allowed themselves to fully imagine.
And then he said: “This isn’t what you think it is.”
She looked at him. “What is it?”
He set the box on the kitchen table between them. It was small and wooden — old, worn at the corners, the kind of box that had been opened and closed many times.
“Open it,” he said.
She opened it.
Inside was a key. Old brass, the kind that belonged to a lock that was no longer common. And beneath the key, folded carefully, a document.
She unfolded it.
It was a deed. For a property — a building on the north side of Chicago. Not t
