Page 160 of Final Drive

It’s plain and low-set, a single stone in a bezel with nothing standing up off the band. The least dramatic ring in the shop. It looks like it could survive a boat, a wrench, a rigging job, and a decade of Reese forgetting she’s wearing it.

“That one.”

Beckett opens his mouth, then closes it again.

Bo looks down at the ring. “Yeah.”

So that’s the one.

Eight men take seventy minutes to arrive at the ring Cameron apparently knew about in the first four. He’d rather be right at the end of a process than spend the beginning arguing about it.

Reese walks in while we’re still at the counter.

Beckett texted her thirty seconds after the decision, directly in front of me, because the idea of keeping this a surprise died somewhere around the point when eight bonds lit up simultaneously in a jewelry store.

She comes through the door with her hair still wet from practice and stops.

Nobody says anything.

Zane, still red around the eyes, finally says, “We got here at ten.”

“I know what time you got here.”

He blinks. “You do?”

“I’ve known since about ten-fifteen.”

“You didn’t say anything.”

“I wanted to see how long it took you.”

“An hour and ten minutes,” Tyler says.

“That’s better than I estimated.”

She comes to the counter and looks down at the ring on the velvet. Her face changes in a way I’ve only seen a couple of times, both on water.

Bo says, “Cameron picked it.”

“Obviously Cameron picked it.”

We do the last of the registration at the dining room table the night before I file it. Nine people, not enough chairs, papers everywhere.

Tyler reads the bond registry numbers while Eli checks each one against the health center receipts. It takes eleven minutes and may be the least romantic administrative event ever conducted by people legally calling themselves a pack.

Then I get to page three.

“There’s one field left.”

Bo looks up. “For what?”

“Designated principal.” I turn the form around so it faces the middle of the table. “It’s the state contact. Correspondence, filings, notices. One name.”

Beckett leans back in his chair. “That doesn’t sound administrative.”

“It is now. Historically, not so much. The statute still uses the old language.”

Nobody says anything for a moment.