…walking her down the aisle. Her father.”
I didn’t sleep. In the morning, I put the photo of the engraving on the kitchen table in front of my husband, Tom, and waited.
He looked at it and his eyes filled with tears. “I was going to tell you this weekend,” he said. “I swear I was.”
The initials were R.M. Rebecca Morgan. She was thirty-four. Six months earlier, she had found Tom through a DNA test.
Thirty-five years ago, before Tom and I met, he’d had a brief relationship with a woman named Karen. She moved away suddenly. She never told him she was pregnant. Rebecca grew up believing her father had abandoned them. Karen died last year, and in her papers, Rebecca found Tom’s name.
They’d met for the first time six months ago. That was the date engraved inside the ring. Rebecca was getting married in the spring, and she’d asked him to walk her down the aisle. The ring was her gift — a symbol, she told him, that he was family now.
His own ring, the one with the hammer scratch, was in his briefcase. He’d taken it off to wear hers during their visit, because he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Then he forgot to switch them back.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
“Because I was terrified you’d think I’d lied to you for thirty-three years,” he said. “I didn’t know she existed. I didn’t know how to say it.”
I was hurt. But not by Rebecca. By the six months he’d kept her a secret.
I asked him to call her that afternoon. She came to dinner the following Sunday. She was nervous and lovely, and she had Tom’s laugh. Before she left, she hugged me and whispered, “Thank you for sharing him.”
In the spring, I watched my husband walk his daughter down the aisle. He wore both rings that day: ours on his left hand, hers on his right.
