36. Natalie
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Natalie
Ihadn't taken my wedding ring off during the separation, not out of any statement I meant to make, simply because it had never occurred to me to remove it, a small, private fact I hadn't examined until Claire noticed it one evening in July, drying dishes together at her sink.
"You never took it off," she observed, nodding at my hand. "Five months, and you never took it off."
"I didn't think about it, honestly. It just felt like mine. Not like something that belonged to the marriage being fine or not fine."
"That's interesting," Claire said, in the mild, observational way she said most things that actually mattered.
"I took mine off for about two weeks during the year Rich and I almost didn't make it.
Felt important at the time, some kind of statement.
In hindsight I think I just wanted to hurt him a little, and myself too, if I'm honest."
I turned the ring on my finger, the same simple band Daniel had saved for eight months to afford, back when eight months of saving had meant something entirely different to our finances than it would now.
"I never wanted to hurt him that way. I wanted him to understand what he'd actually broken, but I never wanted him to doubt that I still loved him, even while I was furious.
Those felt like two separate things to hold onto. "
"That's a healthier place to sit than I managed at your stage of things," Claire said, smiling. "For what it's worth."
Daniel noticed it too, eventually, the week before he asked me to dinner, catching my hand across the kitchen table during a custody handoff and running his thumb once over the ring before letting go, saying nothing about it at the time, though he mentioned it later, once we were back together, lying in bed one night with the lamp still on.
"I used to check, every single handoff, whether you were still wearing it," he admitted. "Never said anything, because I didn't think I had any right to ask. But I checked every time."
"I never once thought about taking it off," I told him.
"It wasn't that I wasn't angry enough. Being angry at you and still loving you were never actually in conflict, not once, the whole time.
I think that confused me more than almost anything else, that I could be that furious and still want my ring on my hand. "
"I'm glad you didn't take it off," he said quietly. "I don't think I would have said anything if you had. I don't think I'd have had the right to. But some nights, lying here alone, that was the one thing I let myself hold onto. That you were still wearing it, even after everything."
We bought new bands the following spring as a second, smaller ceremony between just the two of us.
We kept wearing the old ones too. Standing in the same backyard where we'd once hosted a company Fourth of July picnic, Maddie and Jack as the only witnesses, Daniel recited vows he'd written himself, unpolished and specific in a way that suited him far better than anything more eloquent could have.
"I promise to protect what's yours in my life the way I protect what's mine," he said, holding both my hands, Jack fidgeting beside us in a miniature suit he'd outgrow within the year.
"It's not that you need protecting. You deserve a husband who understands the difference between assuming something's safe and actually keeping it that way. "
I slid the new band onto his finger, beside the original one, still slightly dented from twelve years of job sites, and understood, standing there in our own backyard with our children watching and no audience beyond the four of us, that this small, private ceremony meant more to me than the gala ever had, precisely because nobody was there to be impressed by it, nobody's assumptions to correct, nobody's story to tell except our own, told plainly, to each other, exactly the way it always should have been.