Chapter 2
It took me a few seconds to catch up to what he was doing.
The ring was already halfway off, so I clapped my other hand over it and looked up at him with my eyes burning.
"Stephen, this is our engagement ring.
"You don't just pull it off, and you definitely don't hand it to somebody else!"
Emma stood off to the side and watched me, still smiling.
She looked perfectly relaxed about it, like she already knew how this was going to end.
For the first time in all the years I had known him, Stephen looked at me like I was wasting his time.
"Engagement. That was two kids playing a game. Em likes it. Take it off and give it to her."
The floor went out from under me.
If I hadn't heard it with my own ears, I never would have believed my Stephen could say a thing like that.
When I was 10, I found Stephen on the side of the road after a car hit him, barely breathing, and I ran for help.
My dad ran the little clinic in our town, and he spent every dollar he had putting Stephen back together.
We spent almost 10 years side by side after that, right up to the day we got engaged.
He never stopped being grateful for it, and he was good to me.
The night we got engaged he held on to me and cried, and he swore he would never let me down.
It had never once crossed my mind that he could turn into a stranger.
I kept both hands locked over the ring and stared at him, my eyes wide and stinging.
"Where I come from, getting engaged means you stand up in front of both families and say it out loud! It means we promised each other the rest of our lives!"
None of it registered with Stephen.
He had run out of patience, and he didn't look at me again.
He caught my wrist, pried my fingers back, and pulled the ring off.
Then he slid it onto Emma's finger, gentle about it, with his eyes on nobody but her.
My face twisted up and I doubled over, gagging on nothing.
I couldn't stay in that room another second, so I ran straight out into the rain.
One of the housekeepers looked like she meant to come after me.
Behind me, Stephen's voice came through the rain, cold in a way I had never heard from him before.
"Nobody go after her. She can come back when she's calmed down and thought about what she did!"
The second the rain hit me, I understood exactly where I stood.
The last person I had in the world was gone too.
*****
By the time I came out of it, the sky had already started to lighten.
For days on end, Stephen went everywhere with Emma.
They left for the office together in the morning and came back hand in hand at dusk.
At night I sat out in the yard and watched the light in their bedroom stay on until almost midnight.
For a long stretch they were inseparable, easy with each other, and their days ran smooth.
Nobody in that house said my name once.
Then a month went by and the holidays came around.
The weather turned, and Riverside City got its first snow.
Stephen came out of the house that morning.
His assistant had been waiting outside, and he came up the steps fast with an umbrella.
Stephen stopped on the top step, watched the snow come down, and stayed there a long time without moving.
Before I turned 19, I still lived back in our old town.
Every time it snowed, I pestered Stephen into building a snowman with me.
He never said much, and he almost never told me no.
He could build one as tall as I was.
Then he took a twig and scratched in a face, line by line, until it looked a little like mine.
When I was in a good mood I would sneak up behind him, grab a handful of snow, and shove it down his collar.
My dad always stood in the doorway and hollered at me from a distance, though he never meant much by it.
Stephen never got angry with me.
He would dig the snow out of his collar while I stood there cackling at him.
Then he would turn around and give me that soft, forgiving smile of his.
I used to think he only ever smiled for me.
Then I met Emma.
I pulled myself out of it with my nose stinging.
Stephen was still standing on that step, and I had no idea what was going through his head.
I knew perfectly well that he had stopped loving me a long time ago.
So whatever he was turning over up there, it wasn't me, and it wasn't any of that.
Then, after a long while, he turned to his assistant and asked him something.
"Alysha still hasn't started begging to come home?"