It was a small red box. Not velvet. But a ring box all the same. I opened it. And, inside, saw a diamond ring. And such a pretty one—a little like it was from another time. A little like it belonged right here, with us, in this aging sitting room.
I took it out, holding it between my thumb and index finger, looking back up at him.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
I was still holding the ring between my fingers, still totally unsure what was going on.
“I came here tonight because I was going to propose.”
“To who?” I asked.
“You.”
I looked back down at the ring, the olden-days ring, completely and utterly speechless. “But . . . I’m married,” I said.
“I know that.”
I looked back up at him. “You waited until I was married to ask me to marry you?” I said.
He started to answer me, but I put my hand up to cut him off.
“Are you nuts?” I said.
“Just look.”
He motioned for me to look inside the ring, where he’d written the same thing he’d written on the back of a locket, in another life, the one we lived in together: For you, for always.
“This is crazy,” I said.
Then I stood up to go. Why was it taking so long to get out of this terrible room?
“Look, Annie, I know it’s so screwed up between us now,” he said. “And I know it’s in large part my fault.”
He was standing up now too, blocking my exit. Putting his hands up in the air, between us, in the calm-down motion.
“But you need to know that nothing ever happened. With Pearl,” he continued. “It was never about her. It was about the idea of her, the idea of that kind of life . . . something simpler, stationary. About what I thought I was supposed to want, versus what I actually want, if that makes any sense.”
“Not a lot,” I said.
He looked at me, and in some ways I was waiting for an answer, but in some ways I knew exactly what he meant. And he knew that I knew. He was trying to tell me that nothing happened. What are the lines you can cross and come back from? Hadn’t he stayed somewhere within the worst ones?
“We want the same things. We’ve built our lives, our careers, around them. And we can still have what we had, Adams. I already have two projects lined up in Europe over the next six months. And it looks like I’m going to get to shoot the new movie in Brazil at the end of the year. We can travel the world together.” He smiled at me. “It was unfair of me to judge you for wanting that, for wanting that freedom. When clearly that’s what I want too. What I want with you.”
I tried to think of how to say no—that that wasn’t what I wanted anymore. I wanted something more solid. Not starts and stops of a life—something more continuous, more grounded, something that could grow. But then how could I explain the part of me that had been looking for a way out of Williamsburg from the moment I arrived?
“I need to leave here, Nick,” I said.
“I know what you were afraid to tell me,” he said, instead of listening. “You probably don’t think about it much now, but the day I left, you weren’t that surprised. You seemed, at least a part of you seemed, to be expecting it.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is, it all just got to my head, for a minute. The movie’s success and my three and a half minutes of fame. It got me questioning all sorts of things about my life. And I couldn’t be more sorry about how that’s impacted you. I think you know that.” He paused. “And, the thing is, I just keep thinking that now I know it too, now I can make it okay for you, the part that scares you the most.”
“Which is what?” I said, finally.
“You can count on me,” he said. “I’ll always be here.”
I looked at him in shock.