The Mark on His Finger
I saw it when he reached for his water glass.
A pale band of skin around his left ring finger. White against the sunburn on the rest of his hand. Clean edges. Perfect width.
A wedding ring mark.
I set my fork down very slowly.
Mark hadn’t worn his wedding ring in twelve years.
“What’s that?” I asked.
He was chewing. He looked up at me, then followed my eyes down to his own hand.
For one second, he froze. Completely. Like a man caught in a flashlight in the middle of the night.
Then he laughed.
“Huh,” he said. He turned his hand over and looked at it like he’d never seen it before. “Probably from holding the fishing rod. Gripped that thing for three days straight.”
“From the fishing rod.”
“Yeah. You know how it is. Sun hits everything except where your hand’s wrapped around the handle.” He picked up the glass and drank. “This chicken’s great, Lena. Did you do something different?”
“Same as always.”
“Well, it’s great.”
I didn’t argue. I just picked up my fork and pushed a piece of potato around my plate and watched him eat.
I’d been married to Mark Ellison for twenty-six years. I knew every expression that man had. I knew the face he made when he was tired, the face he made when he was lying about liking my sister’s lasagna, the face he made when he was trying not to cry at a movie.
And I had never, not once in twenty-six years, seen the face he made just now.
That freeze.
That flashlight look.
He was hiding something…. TAP TO CONTINUE STORY PART2
