Chapter 2
Naomi
Istood in front of the mirror the evening of our anniversary, zipping myself into the green dress — the one Aaron said, early on, made me look like trouble — and I thought about how much of him was actually me.
Five years of running his calendar without him knowing it was his calendar.
Remembering which client took his coffee black and which one's wife had just finished chemo.
Finding the loose thread in whatever deal was falling apart and pulling it, quietly, so he could walk into the office the next morning with an answer he thought he'd dreamed up himself.
I never corrected him. That was the job.
The job was to make Aaron look like a man who had it all handled.
I used to think that was love. The invisible part. The part that only works if nobody sees it.
But there was an emerald in the closet now, and for three weeks I'd let myself believe he finally saw me.
I called Tia while I did my hair, phone propped against the mirror, because some news is too big to hold alone and she'd been my person since we were nineteen.
"Okay, don't laugh at me," I said, working the curling iron through the ends. "I think Aaron actually did something romantic."
"Define romantic." Her voice had that flat, amused edge she got. Music playing somewhere behind her, low.
"I found a box. Jeweler's velvet, the good kind. I think he actually did something romantic." I didn’t tell her I opened it.
The music kept playing. She didn't say anything.
"Tia?"
"No, that's—" A pause, one beat too long. "That's great, Naomi. That's really great. He's giving it to you tonight?"
"I think so. It’s our anniversary dinner. I'm doing the whole gasp-and-cry thing. I've been practicing." I laughed. She didn't. "You okay? You sound weird."
"Just tired. Long week." The smile came back into her voice, a little too bright now. "Send me a picture when you're wearing it, okay? I want to see."
"I will. Wish me luck."
"You don't need luck," she said. "Go knock him dead."
I hung up glowing, and it didn't occur to me — not for one second — to wonder why my best friend had gone quiet at exactly the wrong moment.
He'd made a reservation — the place we'd gone for our first anniversary, before the years sanded the specialness off things. When his text came through with the time and can't wait tacked on, two whole words more than he usually gave me, I pressed my phone to my chest like a teenager.
He stood when I reached the table. He never did that anymore. He pulled out my chair, and my pulse ticked up, and I thought, here it comes.
We ordered wine. We talked — really talked, the way we hadn't in months — about nothing important, and it felt important because we were doing it at all.
He laughed at something I said and reached across the table to squeeze my hand, and for a moment I thought my heart might crack down the middle from how easy it would be to have this back.
Then his phone lit up against the tablecloth.
He glanced at it. Typed something under the table, thumb moving fast, eyes flicking down and up. A minute later it lit again, and he did it again.
"Work?" I asked.
"Mm." He didn't look up.
I sat there in my green dress, on the one night of the year that was supposed to be ours, and watched my husband have a conversation with someone who wasn't me.
The candle flickered between us. My wine sweated in its glass.
And the anger came up so quietly I almost didn't recognize it — not a flare, just a cold, familiar settling, like sediment sinking to the bottom of a glass.
I knew this feeling. I'd been swallowing it for months.
Unseen. Even here. Even now. I had planned my own reaction to a gift I wasn't supposed to know about, because that was easier than admitting the truth I kept shoving down: that I could sit directly across from Aaron, in the dress he used to love, and still be the least interesting thing in the room.
The phone lit a third time. He turned it face-down — not toward me, I noticed. Away.
"Sorry," he said, finally looking up, and gave me the smile that used to work on me. "Where were we?"
"Nowhere important," I said, and smiled back, and hated how good I was at it.
The whole time, one bright thread ran under everything: the necklace. When does he do the necklace. I'd already decided how I'd react. The gasp. The hand to my mouth. I'd let him be the hero.
The entrées came. Then dessert — one plate, two forks, the way we used to. He slid an envelope across the white tablecloth and my breath caught.
A card.
A nice card, more than a signature inside for once. Five years. Here's to five more. Love, A.
I read it twice. I told him it was perfect. And I waited.
He paid. He helped me into my coat. He kissed me in the parking lot, soft, his hand at my jaw — the first time he'd kissed me like he meant it since spring — and I nearly forgot about the box entirely.
Then we drove home, and he yawned, and said it had been a long week, and went up to bed.
No box.
I lay awake beside him and my brain made excuses just to keep out the hurt.
He was saving it. Of course he was. The restaurant was too public, too obvious — he'd want something quieter, more his speed.
Breakfast, maybe. Or tucked into my bag so I'd find it at my desk and he wouldn't have to stand there and watch me react.
That was more like him. I turned toward the shape of his shoulder in the dark and let the story soothe me down into sleep.
Tomorrow, I told myself.
He was gone before I woke. An early call, a note on the counter: coffee's on.
No box on the counter. Nothing in my bag — I checked twice. I stood in the kitchen with my coffee going cold and felt the first thread of something I didn't want to name start to pull loose.
Then my feet took me upstairs.
I told myself I was putting away laundry. I told myself a lot of things, excuses mostly. But I went straight to the closet, straight to the top shelf, behind the sweaters, to the exact spot — and I think I already knew, before my fingers closed on nothing.
The box was gone.
I stood on my toes with my arm buried to the elbow in wool, feeling around a space that was unmistakably empty. And the warm, foolish excitment I'd carried for three weeks went very quiet.
He took it out to give it to me, I told myself. He has it with him. That's all.
I almost believed it. I wanted to believe it so badly I could taste it.
I was reaching to shut the closet when I saw the jacket — Aaron's charcoal blazer, the one he'd worn last week, hung on the hanger.
Force of habit made me reach to straighten it, and force of habit made me check the pockets, because Aaron left everything everywhere and I'd learned the hard way to check before things went to the dry cleaners.
My fingers closed on a slip of paper.
A receipt. Cardstock, heavy, from a jeweler downtown — Bellamy & Crane, a name I didn't recognize. I unfolded it, and the numbers swam up at me.
One pendant. Emerald. Gold chain.
Four thousand, two hundred dollars.
I read it twice, and the second time my eyes caught the line underneath the price, the little handwritten note the salesperson had jotted in the margin, the way they do when they want to remember a customer:
Gift — engraving to follow.
Engraving.
I stood there in the closet with the receipt in one hand and my heart going strange in my chest. Because I'd held that necklace. I'd turned it in the light and studied the little leaf-curl of gold above the stone.
There'd been no engraving on it at all.