“Thank you,” I say. It hadn’t occurred to me to ask for proof, so I’m glad he offered. “Here, it’s yours. I’m so pleased it’s found you again.”
Eric clears his throat as I click open the Tupperware, and I make a mental note to move these rings into something less conspicuously shabby. This box does not scream “We have taken great care of your possessions.” The trouble is, Lucas has been needling me about keeping valuable items in a Tupperware, so now if I switch them into something else, I look like I’m conceding.
“Give it to my son,” Eric says when I hold the ring out. He averts his eyes. “It’s yours now, Charlie, all right?”
Charlie’s mouth forms an almost perfect O. He looks between each of us, even Lucas, who is just standing in a looming sort of way and not bothering to introduce himself to anybody.
“You . . . Do you mean that?” Charlie says to his father.
“Do you need me to say it twice?”
“No, I . . . But as in . . . You understand that if I have Mum’s ring, I’m going to . . .”
“Use it to propose to that young man of yours, yes,” Eric says, tone clipped. He looks up at the ceiling. “Quite right. You’ve made him wait long enough.”
“I’ve made . . .” Charlie snaps his mouth closed. “Wow.”
I knew this ring mattered. I could just feel it when it first glimmered up at me on that piece of kitchen paper. I let my gaze slide to Lucas. It’s generally hard to read his expression—he defaults to a pretty unchanging “implacable”—but his gaze is very fixed as he watches Charlie tear up in front of us.
“Mum would have wanted that,” Charlie says to his father. “I really . . . Thank you.”
“Yes, well,” Eric says. “I may have been a bit . . . picky for you. Hiro isn’t too bad. I just want you to be happy.”
This last part looks like news to Charlie. He takes it with a slight wobble of his bottom lip.
“There’ll be a reward,” Eric says, turning back to us abruptly and pulling out his phone. “Let me look into the numbers.”
“Sorry?” I say. “A . . .”
“Financial reward. This ring is worth a large sum. I appreciate the lengths you went to in order to return it to us. It is . . . greatly significant to my family.”
I watch Eric’s Adam’s apple bob as he swallows, and despite myself I feel my eyes brim up. My dad was nothing like Eric—he was warm, open, ready to laugh. But I can’t help thinking of Dad. The ring he gave me for my twenty-first birthday, now lying at the bottom of the sea after a stupid drunk swim in Brighton on my twenty-second birthday. I touch my necklace, the gold chain Mum gave me for my twenty-first—Something different from each of us, you know what we’re like, can’t agree on anything!
“That’s incredibly kind of you, sir,” Lucas says when I fail to answer. He shoots me an odd look before returning his attention to Eric. “Can we invite you to stay for a drink with your son?”
I shake myself. “Yes! And actually . . .” I look at Charlie as he steps forward and takes the ring reverently from my palm. “If you’re looking for a gorgeous location to propose, you’ve found the perfect place.”
He looks around the hotel as if noticing where he is for the first time.
“Huh,” he says. “That would be cute, wouldn’t it? Given Mum’s ring was here all this time.”
“We can meet to talk about that now, if you wish,” Lucas says, smelling profit, no doubt. “I’m available.”
“As am I!” I say, already mentally composing a message cancelling my evening plans. I suspect Charlie is going to do his proposal in a big way, and that disposable income is not a problem for his family, which means that right now, I am Charlie’s number-one fan.
“Perfect,” Eric says, making his way towards the bar. “Charlie! A drink before our meeting.”
Charlie follows after his father in a daze.
“You’re not getting the credit for this, if that’s your plan, muscling in with your ‘meeting,’？” I say to Lucas. “The Ring Thing was my idea.”
“You hardly expected this to happen,” Lucas scoffs.
That grates on me, so I smile. I know this smile winds Lucas up. It’s my most obliging, most engaging one—the one that always makes guests calm down when they’re angry. It has the opposite effect on Lucas. I suspect he knows that when I smile like this, really I’m thinking, You’re an idiot, and I’m going to be so nice to you, you won’t even notice that I’m getting my way and you’re not getting yours.