It was like a veil slipped from my vision. What was a hazy vision came into focus. I could see each pore on his slanted nose. Every crack in his forehead. And there were these splotches on his cheeks, just above his scratchy beard, that seemed to flare the longer I looked.

“Emily?” The lips beneath the beard called. I looked from his mouth to his eyes. Had they always been so red-rimmed?

Some automatic part of me nodded my head. I was agreeing to something, I think. His hands were fumbling with something on the table and I caught a flash of gold. He was twisting the too-tight ring that cinched the belly of his finger.

It hadnt always been so ill-fitting. The ring. The day we picked it out, it glided over his knuckle and sat in place. Firm, but breatheable.

Now, his throat made a rhaspy, old man noise that we would’ve laughed about, had we not been here, in this specific scenario, as he yanked the ring over his knobby knuckle to freedom.

He dropped it into my palms. Clammy hands that had subconsciously opened up for him. The spell might be over, but the 5 years of muscle memory would take longer to fade.

The ring wasn’t as cold as I anticipated. It clung to his body heat. I slipped it onto my middle finger to distract myself, while he told me what was i should expect. It looked ridiculous on my bony finger. I looked up at him to see if he was in on the joke.

He wasn’t looking at his ring in my finger, thiugh. He was looking at the papers he had pulled out of bag next to him. Then he was grabbing the pen I had swiped from the dentist last week and sliding it to me.

But it wasn’t him anymore, this stranger who was pushing papers and dentist-pens towards me. It was some man with pores on his nose, red-rimmed eyes and a finger with a faint, white scar where my love used to live.