Bloomington

Only You

11:14 A.M.

The doorbell rang twice, then a third time with the impatience of someone who had three more deliveries on the block and was not interested in waiting.

Catherine looked up from her laptop. Jackie was still out. She had taken Ethan for what she called a short walk forty-five minutes ago and had not returned, which meant she had run into something or someone she found interesting and lost track of time entirely. This was, Catherine had come to understand, simply how Jackie moved through the world.

She went to the door.

The delivery driver handed her a slim white box, no bigger than a paperback, and was gone before she had fully processed what she was holding. The return address was the jeweller's. No other markings. Nothing that announced itself.

Catherine stood in the doorway for a moment, looking at it.

Then she closed the door, carried it to the kitchen table, and sat down.

She had been waiting for this for two weeks. She had tracked it compulsively, refreshed the page at unreasonable hours, rehearsed in her head approximately what she would feel when it arrived. She had thought she was prepared.

She was not prepared.

She opened the outer packaging carefully, then the inner box, and there it was: a small velvet ring box, deep navy blue, sitting in a nest of tissue paper. She lifted it out. It was lighter than she expected. She held it for a moment without opening it, the way you hold something you are not quite ready to make real.

Then she opened it.

The ring was exactly what she had seen on the screen at two in the morning, and nothing like it at all. In person, it caught the light differently. The blue diamond sat in its bezel setting like something that had always existed and had simply been waiting to be found. The clusters of smaller stones around it made the whole thing look like a fragment of a clear winter sky.

Catherine set the box carefully on the table and tilted it toward the window.

Bold but grounded. Rare but real. She had thought those words when she ordered it and they were still true now. She had never been more certain of a choice in her life, which was remarkable given that she had spent most of her life being very certain of most of her choices.

She picked the ring up carefully and turned it over. There, on the inside of the band, in small clean letters:

Only you.

Catherine set it down. Put both hands flat on the table. Looked at the ceiling for a moment.

She had not expected to cry. She was not, generally, someone who cried easily. She had written it off as a design of her personality: she processed things internally, moved through emotion with efficiency, and came out the other side intact. This had served her well for a long time.

But her eyes were definitely wet, and the ring was sitting there, and the house was very quiet, and she thought about a girl who had walked into a professor's office fifteen years ago and looked at her like she was worth seeing.

She pressed her fingers to her eyes. Breathed.

Then she closed the box, walked it carefully to the bedroom, and tucked it into the back of her sweater drawer under a cashmere pullover Jackie never touched because she found cashmere itchy.

Safe. Secret. Ready.

The Writing

She went back to the table and opened her laptop.