Arjun tilts his head, tapping the pen on the menu. “You’re being an optimist,” he says eventually. “And a romantic.”
“So . . . ridiculous?”
“No.” He gives me his full attention—a rare thing from Arjun. “You’re being Izzy, and it’s excellent,” he says, as though it’s as simple as that. “Now, excuse me. I have some parsnips to salt.”
I watch him go with a lump in my throat. I have seen Arjun almost every day for eight years. At first we didn’t click, but slowly, week by week, we’ve become more than colleagues, more even than friends. I’ve cried on him several times, and he cried on me after his awful, toxic divorce. We might never have been mates outside of this place, but now we rely on each other—he’s part of my life. For Lucas, losing this job would probably be an inconvenience. For me, it would be like losing a family all over again.
And I just can’t.
* * *
? ? ? ? ?
On the last Monday of November, when I am two days away from having to sell that curious Tupperware of rings, a straight-backed man in a razor-sharp suit comes marching into the lobby. Poor Mandy is setting up, gamely creating herself a space amongst all the lost-property boxes, and I’m already on my way out the door—I’ve got drinks with a couple of temps I used to work with when I first started at Forest Manor.
“Eric Matterson,” the man announces when he reaches the desk. “I’m here about a ring.”
Mandy’s eyes find mine. I dash over.
Eric looks about sixty—he is greying at the temples and has a deep frown-line between his eyebrows. This is exactly how I imagined the guy on the phone. He has the carefully pressed look of a military type, and an intimidating air of steeliness.
“A French nineteenth-century rose-cut diamond,” he is saying, “set into a claw in a D-shaped gold ring of approximately three millimetres in width.”
“Hi,” I say.
He looks at me. “Hello,” he says, as if humouring me. “Cushion-cut diamonds around the central stone.”
I already know the one he means—I emailed him the picture two days ago. It’s a beautiful ring. Obviously antique, even to an amateur like me. My stomach flutters with excitement.
“Does it belong to you?” I ask.
He stares at me. “Yes. Obviously.”
A young man darts through the door behind him, shaking out his coat in a shower of drops like a dog out of water. Poor Mandy heads over to take his umbrella, unexpectedly dousing her own shoes as she pulls it closed. She looks down at her feet, crestfallen, before returning to the desk with the air of a woman who fully expects the universe to give her wet shoes.
“Dad, can you stop doing that?” the young man says, trying to rearrange his hair in the large mirror hanging on the lobby wall. Mrs. SB was measuring that up this morning—I doubt it’ll be here much longer.
“Doing what?” Eric asks.
“Slipping off,” his son says with exasperation. “Dad was a spy in the Cold War,” he explains to us, joining his father at the desk. “Some habits can’t be shaken off, apparently. I’ve only just about persuaded him to communicate over an encrypted messenger app instead of using those super hard-core ones that all the terrorists are on, you know?”
“Charlie,” Eric says, face set in an expression of fixed patience, “please will you stop telling strangers that I was a spy in the Cold War?” His eyes flick towards me, then Mandy, face barely moving. “I wasn’t a spy,” he says.
“No, of course not,” says Mandy just as Lucas appears behind her, as if from nowhere, Lucifer-style.
For such a big man, he can be surprisingly stealthy. He’s still in his uniform, but he’s wearing the wrong shoes—trainers instead of his usual shining black brogues—as if he started getting changed and then thought better of it. I don’t know what he’s doing lurking here. We all know he thinks the Ring Thing is stupid and sentimental. I hope he’s not planning to sabotage this in revenge for the pin cushion from lost property that I inadvertently left on his chair yesterday.
“Proof,” Eric says, reaching into his pocket and laying a photograph on the desk between us.
It’s old and faded, A5, just like the ones in my parents’ photo albums. The man in the image is unmistakably Eric—as straight-backed as he is today—and the woman showing the camera her ring beside him looks just as serious.
“My wife,” Eric says, and for the first time, I catch a hint of emotion from him.