Page 173 of 10 Rings I Hate About You
To my favorite grandson,
Please hold on to ten of my favorite rings. There may come a day when you might need one of them.
Love you always,
Glamma
I read it twice. Then I started laughing—the slightly hysterical kind when the release of adrenaline has nowhere to go. “Ten rings,” I managed. “She gave you ten rings.”
“I didn’t open the box when she gave it to me,” Marc said, in a tone that told me he was clearly regretting that decision.
“Marc.” I looked at him, still laughing, a hand pressed to my sternum where my heart was only now returning to its normal rhythm. “I thought you were going to propose.”
Marc’s hand rubbed along the back of his neck. “Delaney, fuck. It’s not that I haven’t thought about it—” He stopped. “But I was planning to wait. To let us keep getting to know each other. I wasn’t—” He exhaled. “Fuck, will you say something because I think I’m screwing this up big time.”
I gently took the box from his hands and placed the ring back inside. Then I looked at this precise, careful, quietly extraordinary man who had just admitted he’d thought about it, who had cooked me dinner, and said “I love you” like it was something he’d been working towards for years. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m not quite ready for that step yet, either. And I’d want it to be something we talked about first. When we’re both ready.”
He cupped my cheek and placed the sweetest kiss against my lips. “I love you,” he whispered against my mouth.
“I love you, too.” If we didn’t have such a mess to clean up, I’d take this so much further than the chaste kiss I’d just received. Then something tickled the back of my mind. “Didn’t the note saytenrings?”
Marc glanced back down at the letter I held, and his face went unnaturally pale. “Shit. Yes.”
We found most of them in quick succession: three diamond rings near the overturned table, a ruby one that had rolled under the baseboard heater, and another emerald solitaire that had somehow ended up inside one of Marc’s shoes. Numbers seven and eight turned up near the front door: a pink sapphireand a beautiful blue one. Each more elaborate than the last, each clearly designed by someone who understood that jewelry should have a story. I found myself turning them over in my hand between recoveries, wondering if they were Kingsley Jewelry originals, wondering what occasions they’d marked, and which was Glamma’s favorite.
I counted as we went. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.
Nine.
I counted again. The results were the same. “Marc,” I said carefully. “There’s only nine.”
We looked at each other. Then with the slow, mutual dread of two people who already knew the answer, we both turned toward the hallway leading to Chaos’s room.
“No, no, no, no,” Marc muttered, already moving.
What followed was twenty minutes of increasingly thorough searching—under the basket by the door, inside the hall closet, behind the fallen table, around the stairs, in places a ring had no business being and yet somehow seemed plausible given the evening’s events.
“He couldn’t have eaten it,” I said for the fifth time, crouching to search under the baseboard heater again. “Right? He couldn’t have actually eaten it?”
Marc’s silence was not reassuring.
“Marc.”
“Goats eat things they shouldn’t,” he said carefully. “It happens. The digestive system of a goat is—” He stopped. “It typically takes fifteen hours for something to move through all four chambers, so we won’t know for a while.”
I thought about the priceless Kingsley heirloom ring possibly making its way through four chambers of a goat’s stomach and felt a laugh building.
He sighed. “I have a small portable X-ray machine in the barn. Do you mind if I go get it while you keep looking?”
“No, of course not.” I said a few positive intentions that we wouldn’t need to use it. Although, that hope was quickly diminishing when Marc came back ten minutes later, and I was still looking.
“Any luck?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Damn it. Let’s go in there and at least try to see if he might have swallowed it.” We entered the bedroom to find Chaos chilling on his elevated bed in his crate. He stood when we entered. Marc shut the door behind us. “Can you hold onto his leash for me while I try to take this?”
I nodded.
