“Tell them.”
His eyes dropped to the floor.
When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet.
“Maybe you should just tell us where it is.”
For a second, I honestly thought I had misheard him.
I stared at him.
“What?”
Ryan swallowed. “If you know where it is, just tell us. Then everyone can calm down.”
Everyone.
He said everyone as though the problem was the room’s emotional temperature rather than his mother accusing me of theft and physically dragging me from one room to another.
Something inside me went completely cold.
“You think I stole it too?”
Ryan wouldn’t look at me.
And that was my answer.
Six years of marriage rearranged themselves in my head all at once. Every dinner where he had told me to ignore Linda, every holiday where I had been expected to apologize first, every argument where he had said I was making him “choose sides” simply because I wanted him to acknowledge what had happened. I suddenly understood that Ryan had never been neutral.
Neutrality had simply been the side he chose when he wanted me to carry the cost.
I stood slowly.
My hands were shaking, but my mind was suddenly clear.
Ryan finally looked at me. “Sarah, just—”
I reached for my wedding ring.
His expression changed.
I twisted the ring off my finger and held it between us for one second. It looked absurdly small considering how much of my life I had attached to it.
Then I threw it at his chest.
The ring struck his shirt and dropped onto the carpet.
“You can keep that along with your mother.”
Ryan stared at me.
Linda laughed.
It was a short, satisfied laugh, the sound of someone who believed she had finally won something she had been competing for all along.
I turned toward her.
The wet dish towel was still hanging over my shoulder from the kitchen. I grabbed it, snapped my wrist, and flung it directly at her face.
Linda gasped as the towel struck her cheek and fell to the floor.
Her expression changed from smugness to outrage.
“How dare you!”
