Page 11 of The Ring
What caught my eye was that she was wearing sunglasses. She didn’t often wear them, and thank God for that. Hiding those eyes should be a crime. She only ever wore sunglasses when she wanted to go unnoticed. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to avoid me knowing she was in town or the press, who had finally noticed we were no longer together and were desperately chasing the story. Probably both.
I didn’t care if she didn’t want to see me; once I saw her, I knew I had to get closer to her and talk to her because she’s her and I’m me, and how could I not?
I followed her around the store until she stopped to examine some candles on the lower ground floor, in an area with only acouple of people—probably the emptiest spot I could find in the store on Christmas Eve. I didn’t want a big audience in case we fought. I wasn’t keen on being tomorrow’s news.
I approached her, acting as if I had just seen her, not like I had been following her around the whole store.
“Hey,” I said.
Cornelia looked at me, a little startled. “Hi.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
In response, she simply lifted the two shopping bags she was holding.
Her answer made me a bit mad. I knew our last encounter had ended badly, but she was acting like she’d rather be talking to her Uncle Roland, which said a lot about how she was feeling about me.
“I meant in London,” I clarified.
“Oh,” she said, looking up and thinking for a second before answering, “I live here.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you live in Paris?”
“Well, yes, at the moment?—”
I cut her off. “So technically, you don’t live here.”
“Po-ta-toes, po-tah-toes. It all depends on your definition of living. At the moment, I’m living, and I’m in London. So technically, I live here.”
I could tell she was either uncomfortable or nervous. She has a tell: every time she feels either of those emotions, she touches and twists the ring on her right hand’s ring finger—the one she always wears—and she was doing it. It gave me a strange satisfaction to see her like that. She deserved to feel that way after what she did to me the last time I saw her.
“I don’t know from which dictionary you got that definition from, but to me, living means where you have your main residence and spend most of your time,” I told her.
“Fine,” she sighed, exasperated. “Then I live in Paris, not here.”
I felt pleased with myself for winning the argument—something I normally never do against her. “Now that we’ve finally agreed on that, can we get back to my original question? What are you doing in London?”
“If youmustknow, I’m here for a quick visit. I arrived yesterday and will fly back tomorrow night. I didn’t want anyone to know—only Annabelle and Anthony knew I was coming. But now it’s all ruined, and it’s all Cat’s fault.” She let out a frustrated sigh.
“What?” I asked, frowning. I got everything except the part about the cat. What did Cat have to do with why she was here? Cornelia’s cat is named Cat—she named him after the cat fromBreakfast at Tiffany’s.
She has both a cat and a dog, though neither of us ever knew exactly how she got them. They just sort of… popped out one day. Cornelia says she’s about 80% sure a weird ex-boyfriend of her mother’s, who used to always carry a backpack with a different cat every time I saw him, left the cat behind. The other 20% of her thinks her mother stole the cat from the same ex-boyfriend. It is a nice cat—a white Persian. On the other hand, Cornelia is almost 100% sure her mother brought the brown field spaniel into the house because she wanted the cat gone. She wouldn’t admit it, so she got a dog, hoping it would get rid of the cat. I don’t know why her mother wanted the cat gone. It’s not like she took care of it—the maids did. Either way, the joke was on her because the cat and the dog ended up really enjoying each other’s company.
“I wasn’t planning on leaving my house the entire time I was here, but I noticed Cat had gained weight, and I had to come to change the jumper I got him. If I hadn’t, he would have been sad because Dog was getting a present and he wasn’t. Andwhile I could have told him it was his fault he didn’t have a gift since he wouldn’t fit in the jumper I had gotten him, that would be body-shaming, and body-shaming is so rude. So, my plan of staying incognito was ruined because he went up two sizes,” she explained in almost one breath.
Cornelia only has two settings when she’s nervous: either she goes into verbal diarrhoea mode or barely-talks-at-all mode. It was obvious her choice that day was verbal diarrhoea.
I looked at her, a little amused. I love how her brain works a little differently from most people’s. Most wouldn’t give a second thought to a gift for a cat, but these are the things that would bother her all throughout her visit if she didn’t do something about it. I also love how much she cares about a cat’s feelings, who would probably prefer not to receive an uncomfortable jumper at all. But I know that if she didn’t get him a gift, she’d constantly have intrusive thoughts about the cat being upset with her for not getting him a Christmas present for weeks.
I took a moment to look at her a little more closely—her eyes, her hair, her hands, her fingers—and then I felt a surge of anger hit me as I remembered what was missing, remembered what had happened in Paris, the time I went to see her, and what she had done before that. It infuriated me that she seemed to care more about the cat’s feelings than mine at that moment. All the suppressed anger of the past few months burst out, and soon it took control of me as if I were possessed.
“Brat,” I spat out.
She blinked, confused. “What?”
“After what you did to me in Paris, all you have to talk about is a stupid gift for your cat.”
“First of all, it isn’t a stupid gift—it’s a very expensive jumper from Gucci. And second,what I didto you? What aboutwhatyou did tome?” she retorted, hurt lacing her voice.
