Page 105 of Knights Like These
It’s not flashy. It’s not the kind of ring a hockey player buys to prove a point. The band is gold, thin, and the stone is an oval—with two tiny diamonds tucked on either side like they’rekeeping it company. It looks like something my grandmother might have worn. It looks like something Sydney Lane would pick out for herself if she’d let herself want a ring.
He knows this. Because he knows me.
“Arch.”
“Yeah?”
“This is—”
“My mom helped.” He clears his throat. “I went up to see her in May, took her to lunch, told her I was thinking about it. She, uh—she had a few of my grandmother’s pieces. These small side stones were hers.” He’s not looking at me. He’s looking at the ring. “I had it reset. I hope you like it, honey. But if not—”
I place a hand over my mouth, speechless.
He laughs again, wetter this time, and lifts the ring out of the box. The kitchen light hits the stone and makes it warm, not sharp—rose gold does that. It pulls the gold instead of the white. It looks like late afternoon on my hand before it’s even on my hand.
He takes my left hand. My fingers are still pink from the strawberries and probably a little sticky, and I try to apologize for it, but he shakes his head once likedon’t.Then he just stops. Holds my hand in both of his. Looks at it for a second like he’s memorizing what it looks like before.
“I love you, Sydney.”
“I love you, Arch.”
“I’m going to do this part right, okay?”
“Okay.”
He slides the ring onto my finger. Slow. The band is cool against my skin and a little loose around the knuckle, the way rings always are when they’re new, and it settles at the base of my finger like it’s been waiting for this the whole time.
He brings my hand up and kisses my knuckles, right above the stone.
I wipe my cheek.
“You good?” he murmurs into my hair.
“I’m so good. And I love the ring.”
“Yeah?”
I laugh into his neck, soggy and ridiculous, and lift my head. My ring catches the light over his shoulder, and I look at it because I have to, because I’ve been looking at women’s left hands for fifteen years wondering what mine would look like one day, and here it is. On me. From him. With his grandmother’s stones flanking it.
“Arch.”
“Yeah?”
I cup his face with both hands, pull him down, and kiss him. He tastes like coffee, and the ring is on my finger, and somewhere in the next room, Lily is loudly informing Luke thatDaddy gave Auntie Syd a sparkly.I am going to remember for the rest of my life that the moment Archer Lockwood put a ring on me, his four-year-old daughter narrated it from the next room.
Epilogue
One Year Later
Archer
Eden’s asleep on my chest.
She’s been asleep for forty minutes, since right after the visit from the lactation consultant, and I haven’t moved because I don’t want to be the man who wakes the baby. Sydney’s asleep too — propped up against the hospital pillows, her hand curled near my elbow, her head tipped slightly toward us. The blinds are half-open, and the morning light slants across the foot of the bed.
Eden’s hand rests on my collarbone. Her whole hand. Five perfect fingers, and the entire thing is the size of my pinky.
I am—uh. I’m a wreck. In the calmest possible way. Every part of me is firing at half speed because the only thing that matters in this room is the six-pound-something baby breathing against my sternum, and everything else can wait.
