…“I read your phone. I’m sorry. Yes.” I read it twice. Then I looked up at Claire. She was crying. “I called Marissa three days ago,” she said. “After I found the texts. I begged her to change it. She thought it was the most romantic thing she’d ever heard. I didn’t think it was romantic. I thought it was the only honest thing I could say.”
I sat down beside her on the couch. My legs wouldn’t hold me. “Then why are your bags packed?” I asked. She wiped her eyes. “Because I put spyware on the phone of the man who was planning to marry me,” she said. “Because I didn’t trust you, and you didn’t give me a single reason not to. I was going to leave the ring with you and go. I thought you deserved someone who didn’t do that.”
I looked at the bags by the door. Then at the ring. Then at her. “You already said yes,” I said. “It’s engraved. That’s permanent.”
She laughed through her tears. Then she stopped laughing. “I mean it,” she said. “I need help. My last boyfriend cheated for two years, and I found out from his phone. I’ve been checking every phone since. I don’t know how to stop.”
So we made a deal that night. She deleted the spyware in front of me. I gave her my passcode anyway, freely. And she made an appointment with a therapist the next morning. Not for us. For her. We went together, too, once a month, for a year.
We got married last June. Marissa came to the wedding. During the toasts, she stood up and told everyone the story of the ring with the wrong engraving, the one she’d had to redo twice. Everyone laughed. Claire held up her hand so the whole room could see the band. “It’s not the wrong engraving,” she said. “It’s the truest thing I own.”
