I bought the ring on a wet Thursday in December, the kind of Dublin rain that seems to come at you sideways and personally. I had finished work early near Grafton Street, and I remember standing outside the jeweller with my hands in my coat pockets, pretending I was only looking. Inside, I chose a small gold ring with an oval stone, not because it was the grandest one, but because it looked like something Maeve would wear without feeling watched by it.
We had been together six years then. We lived in a one-bedroom flat in Rathmines, above a shop that sold phone chargers, suitcases, and umbrellas that broke after one gust. Our life was not glamorous, but it was ours. Friday pints in The Bernard Shaw, Sunday walks around St Stephen’s Green, arguments over whose turn it was to buy milk, her cold feet finding mine under the duvet. I had a plan to propose on Christmas Eve after dinner with her parents in Clontarf. I even practised the sentence in the bathroom mirror, whispering it like a criminal confession.
Then, two days before Christmas, Maeve’s father had a stroke. Everything became hospital corridors, vending machine coffee, and whispered updates outside lifts. The ring went into the back of my sock drawer, still in its velvet box, and I told myself I would wait until life steadied again.
But life did not steady. It changed shape.
Her father survived, but he needed help. Maeve spent most evenings in her parents’ house, cooking, cleaning, pretending not to be exhausted. I tried to be useful, but I was clumsy with illness. I brought soup when nobody wanted soup. I said “let me know what you need” when I should have simply done the washing up. Some nights she came home and sat on the edge of the bed without taking off her coat. I would look at the drawer and feel ashamed that, somewhere behind my socks, there was a symbol of a future I was too frightened to mention.
The first year passed like that. The ring stayed hidden.
In the second year, I lost my job. The tech company I worked for cut half the staff, and I spent three months walking around Dublin with my CV in my bag and panic sitting in my chest like a stone. Maeve was kind, but we were both stretched thin. Money became a third person in the flat, sitting between us at dinner. We stopped going out. We stopped laughing easily. I began to think the ring had become ridiculous, like keeping a holiday brochure during a flood.
One night, after a small argument about electricity bills that was really about fear, Maeve said, “I don’t know who we are anymore.”
I nearly opened the drawer then. I nearly pulled out the box and used it like a rescue rope. Instead, I said nothing. That was my great talent at the time, silence dressed up as patience.
By the third year, we were still together, but carefully. We loved each other, I knew that. But love can become careful in a way that feels like handling glass. We had become polite where we used to be playful. We checked the weather, discussed groceries, asked how the other slept. I carried the secret of the ring like a debt.
Then one Saturday in March, Maeve found it.
I was in the kitchen making tea when she called my name. Not loudly. That was worse. I walked into the bedroom and saw her sitting on the floor, the drawer open beside her, the little box in her
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