the box, but the ring wouldn’t come back up past my joint. Shit! I tugged it, pulled at it and even spat on my own stubby, stupid finger to prise the thing off. But it remained stubbornly jammed on.
‘You know we were a little concerned about the table being too big?’ Ben asked nervously, right outside the bedroom door.
‘Mmm?’ I replied, only half-listening. Come off, just come off! I was sweating and wincing at the pain of trying to force this damn ring over my finger without snapping a bone, just as the handle turned. I launched myself to the bedroom door and blockaded it using my body weight to keep Ben from getting in, all the while twisting and tugging at my hand that was now red and swelling up in pain.
‘You okay in there? I can’t get in!’ he called out through the wood.
‘Yeah, fine, just got boxes everywhere. I’ll be out in a sec,’ I called back, my voice strangely high-pitched and strangled.
I could hear him standing on the other side of the door for a few seconds longer, my head throbbing as much as my hand in fear at him coming in.
‘Oh right. I’ll pop the kettle on shall I?’
‘Yep, great, fine, thanks!’
Eventually, as I heard his footsteps on the wooden floors head back towards the kitchen, I let out a sigh of relief. My hand had now turned a strange shade of yellow with angry-looking red blotches from the force of me fighting with this damn ring. With one final tug, and a female tennis player style grunt, it flew off and skittered over to the other corner of the room. I leant my head against the door and tried to control my breathing. I wiped the sweat from my forehead, wincing at my sore finger. I quickly pulled myself together and shoved the ring back in its box, stuffing it back in the pocket where I’d found it.
A moment later the bedroom door opened. Ben was stood there holding out a steaming mug for me. ‘Here you go.’ I was sure his eyes widened at the mess I’d made in the bedroom. ‘You okay, babe?’
‘Ah thanks, yeah, all good. Right, let’s see your masterpiece!’ I said, pecking him on the cheek and shooing him out of the stuffy room, rubbing my sore hand behind my back.
‘Well, like I said, you might need to manage your expectations.’ He coughed. ‘It is a little larger than I’d… well, you’ll see…’ Ben trailed off.
I stopped still as I walked into the lounge. All thoughts of rings and wedding plans vanishing from my mind as I saw what he’d assembled. ‘A little larger?’ I gasped.
The dining-room table that had seemed so stylish in the showroom was now taking up pretty much all of our floor space. It looked ridiculous. I couldn’t concentrate on what he was sheepishly explaining. As he rambled on about measurements, sizes and dimensions, I zoned out and self-consciously rubbed my sore ring finger. Was this an omen? A sign of things to come? Our first proper adult purchase as a couple and it didn’t fit, just like the engagement ring? If that was the case then what the hell did that mean for us?
Equanimity (n.) – Evenness of mind, especially under stress
You know how sometimes they say that when things are going well it is as if the stars are aligned and everything in the universe is exactly how it should be? But, the thing they don’t tell you is how precarious this configuration is, how it can all fall out of alignment at any second. Imagine a steel tightrope with everything perfectly balanced on this sturdy, but still pretty vulnerable wire; this was how my life seemed to me. Maybe I had been too smug, too content, but with the gift of hindsight I could see how a gust of wind, a heavy bird plonking its feathered butt on the high line, or even a slip of the tongue and a secret that was never meant to be shared, could cause all the elements that had previously been so perfectly positioned to tumble and free-fall from a dizzying height to the ground. How could I have known that the laws of physics – or whatever it was that had caused this chain of events – would be the start of the stars falling out of alignment, the start of everything going so very very wrong? How naïve I was.
*
Of course, these thoughts were far from my mind as I went to meet my best friend the next day to fill her in on the drama of discovering the ring, the upcoming proposal and the monstrous dining table taking over my lounge. With all that had happened yesterday – including Ben and me having a silly, bickering row over the sodding table and its elephantine dimensions, ending with me telling him that size does matter – I hadn’t given much thought to what discovering this engagement ring actually meant for us.
Of course, I’d be lying if I told you that I hadn’t, at various times since we met, imagined the wedding day that Ben and I might have. Him in a cool linen suit with his freckled nose, me in a simple but stunning long, floaty dress, both promising our vows as we stared adoringly at each other on an exotic, cashmere-soft, sandy beach. I’d imagined how he would be as a father: kind but fair, hands-on but not smothering.
As fun as these daydreams were – strangely I was always a slimmer, swishy-haired version of myself – we’d never really had deep discussions about babies and weddings. There had been light-hearted jokes at unusual baby names – Ben was on a one-man mission to bring back the name Roy, and I had laughed, but secretly hoped he’d been joking, just in case. But having children and marrying each other wasn’t completely outside the realm of possibility. I mean, we had successfully navigated working together as we ran our ever-growing travel and tour agency for broken-hearted singles, and so far living together had been a sickeningly easy breeze; but neither of us had spoken about marriage being on the cards. At least, not yet.
In a way I was grateful that I’d made the shocking ring discovery, to give me some time to get my head around the idea and figure out if I thought we were in the place Ben so obviously thought we were. Not that I didn’t want to marry my clever, kind, good-looking, amazing-in-the-bedroom boyfriend, of course, but because I’d been so badly burned after ending up a jilted bride before. I was meant to have married my ex, Alex; we’d had everything planned, paid for and organised but just before the big day he had revealed that he had been cheating on me and called the whole thing off. Him uttering those painful words ‘I can’t marry you’, had brought about the biggest change in my life.
I had gone backpacking, met Ben, fallen in love, started my own business and truly found that travel did heal a broken heart. I now believed that what Alex did was the best thing that ever happened to me. Not that it wasn’t heartbreaking and difficult – I mean, what girl wants to be told by someone they love and trust that actually they weren’t worthy enough to become their wife? But, over time, I felt like I’d healed myself and I had discovered that all those irritating clichés people harp on about, like time being the best healer, actually were true.
My life was so much better now than it had ever been, thanks in a large part to Ben and the success we’d made of our joint business. Maybe the non-wedding with Alex was all part of the plan – the rehearsal, if you will – for what would be the wedding of the year with Ben?
‘Will you take over pushing the buggy for a minute?’ Marie asked, breaking me from my bonkers bridal thoughts. ‘I’ve got cramp, another wonderful side effect of being with child,’ she grumbled.
We were slowly meandering around the local park – and I mean slowly; even the ducks were waddling faster than us. Marie was on her ‘get this baby out of me’ mission, and I’d completely forgotten that I’d agreed to support her until she called me this morning. Her due date was still weeks away but she was determined to deliver precisely on time. She’d been exactly the same with her toddler, Cole, her firstborn. Marie was having this baby on her due date, come hell or high water.
‘I don’t feel like I did with Cole, so I need to be upping my game to get this baby out of me,’ she said, as I took over wheeling his pushchair for a while over fallen branches and skirted round piles of dog poo. Marie had a crazed look in her eyes as she spoke. It was a look I remembered seeing when we were both eighteen and