Listen to the author reading this story:
The parcel is small: her name printed in thick black letters, a return address of a shipping centre in Beijing. Inside is a red velvet box. A cold feeling passes over her. She takes a deep breath and opens the box.
She snaps it shut. Then she opens it again.
The diamond glares up at her. Bright and dizzying as a diamond should be, flanked by infinity symbols of tiny diamonds on either side. Her breath quickens. She stares out the window at the seagulls wheeling in the darkening sky. One of them angles down and starts attacking a yellow wrapper as if it had wronged the bird, bright paper flecking Father Griffin Road like confetti. Then the wind scours the pavement bare, as if the paper had never existed at all.
Does this… count? No, this can’t be right. He’s definitely a down-on-one-knee-at-a-restaurant-with-violins-playing or a slip-it-in-the-champagne type. Better watch her drinks from now on. Who knows how many women have choked from accidentally knocking back their own engagement rings?
Just like him, though, addressing the package to her by mistake. She plucks the ring from the box and puts it on her finger. The diamond slips to the side, infinity symbols lolling. Only cold metal glares up at her.
She freezes.
Today is Valentine’s Day.
She stares out the window for a moment longer, then at the ring. She takes it off, places it back in the box, and shoves the box in her back pocket. Then she throws on her Fleetwood Mac hoodie and hurries out.
An icy wind, pregnant with the promise of rain, rips up from the Corrib. She hurries across the bridge into town and up Shop Street. She feels like she’s done something wrong, though she can’t say why. She’s helping him, after all; he’s clearly gone to a lot of effort to make it a surprise, telling her he’d be in Dublin for work and even dropping by a lacy red negligée — two, in fact, saying he wasn’t sure of her size — to complete the ruse he wouldn’t be in Galway on Valentine’s Day.
She almost sighs. So much for her evening of re-bingeing Schitt’s Creek.
She chides herself for this last thought and ducks into the first jeweller’s she sees. In front of her glimmers a sea of claddagh rings; some plain, others with emeralds where the heart is. At the back of the shop, a single customer browses an array of Celtic crosses and rune stones. A young man in his early twenties stands at the register. He has nice blue eyes but lips slightly too large for his narrow face.
‘Excuse me,’ she says to him. ‘Is there some sort of insert I can get so this ring will fit?’ She pulls the red box from her pocket and slides the ring on her finger. ‘See?’
Silence.
‘My boyfriend… I think he’s going to propose tonight.’
‘He’s going to propose to you with this ring?’
‘No, he’s going to propose with the other ginormous diamond ring I have on my finger.’
The young man flushes.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘That was rude.’
‘No, it’s fine.’ His eyes meet hers. ‘Do you mind if I show it to our jeweller?’
‘Not at all.’
She takes off the ring and drops it in his palm. He turns and goes to a door behind the counter. The bell tinkles as the other customer leaves, and she’s alone in the shop. She hugs her hoodie closer. Why’d he have to choose Valentine’s Day? Classic, of course, but last Valentine’s, they’d got in a fight because he’d said the food didn’t hold a candle to back home in Ballygananim, would you believe the one place to eat that isn’t a chipper actually has a Michelin star. And his ex was best friends with the manager so they usually got a discount. And she asked why he’d never taken her to Ballygananim. And he’d said why would she want to go there, it’s only a village in the middle of some fields. And she said it was his village in the middle of some fields, and he’d sulked the rest of the night.
The door at the back opens. The young man slinks out, followed by a short, older man. Eyes rimmed with laugh lines. The older man looks at her and flattens his mouth in an apologetic smile.
‘I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I don’t suppose you know this ring is a fake?’
‘A fake?’
‘I’m sorry.’ He nods at the younger man. ‘Stephen said your boyfriend proposed with this ring?’
She shakes her head. ‘No, I think he’s going to propose. I found the ring when… well, I found it when I shouldn’t have. And now I’m trying to get it resized because he’ll be insufferable if the ring’s too big and it ruins his elaborate show.’
‘Ah.’ The jeweller frowns. ‘I can certainly resize it for you if that’s what you want, but that leaves the problem of the ring being a fake. Why don’t you leave it as is for the big proposal tonight. and then insist on coming here to get it re-sized next week? Bring him, of course. I’ll break the news it’s a fake and he can take the matter up with whatever dodgy site he bought this thing from. And don’t worry, I won’t let on that you saw it beforehand. It’ll be our little secret.’
He winks. She forces a smile.
‘He’ll be raging about the money,’ she says. ‘How much do you think he spent?’
‘If this were real and we were selling it, it’d go for seven, seven and a half.’
Her eyes widen. ‘Thousand?’
He nods.
‘Jesus.’
‘Don’t worry, his credit card company should be able to get his money back eventually. And if by some miracle he’s bought it from a reputable online vendor, he should be able to get a real ring and a grovelling apology.’ A pause. ‘Do you like it?’
‘Sorry?’
‘The design, I mean,’ he says, holding up the ring.
‘Oh. It’s a bit too flashy for me, to be honest.’
He motions her to a case near the front. ‘Why don’t you pick one you like? That way, I can point him in the right direction when you come back.’
She stares down at the waves of engagement rings, the fluorescent backlighting garish against all the diamonds. Above, the rain starts to pound on the roof. Hard.
‘I don’t know,’ she says at last. ‘I don’t even know if…’ She forces the rest of her sentence down; she’s not ready to say it. Not out loud anyway, and certainly not to a stranger.
The jeweller gives her a long look, then glances at the ring and frowns. ‘Funny, just last week someone brought in a ring like this and it turned out to be a crazy sort of scam.’ He says it softly, more to himself than to her.
‘What?’
‘Oh nothing. This was different. As far as I can remember, the man was randomly sent the ring in the mail from China. Some convoluted fraud, not someone’s boyfriend — or should I say, fiancé — buying a ring from a dodgy website, which is what I suspect happened in your poor fella’s case.’ He shuts the red box and hands it back to her. ‘See you soon.’ He winks again.
‘Thank you. Thank you very much,’ she says as she pushes out the door into the pouring rain. She half-runs, half-slides down Shop Street, which is nearly deserted except for the odd well-umbrella-ed or heavily raincoated passerby. As if everyone has prepared for the weather but her.
It isn’t until she’s halfway over the bridge that she stops. She stares down at the black water, the froth of the rapids, the little squalls of wind and rain as they meet the surface of the river. And she thinks of Paris, of the day she’d planned a picnic in the Tuileries but it was pissing it down so they had lunch in a Martiniquais restaurant instead; how they quarrelled over the main course and how for dessert she ordered the rum flight; how one of the rums was flavoured with hot pepper and burned so bad it almost made her sick. How she could still taste the rum as they crossed over the Seine and how she stared at the rain meeting dark water and wondered if she’d enjoy Paris more on her own; and what was the point of relationships anyway.
And her answer:
So you don’t have to weather the emptiness of human existence alone.
She takes one last look at the Corrib, rippled and angry, and heads back to her flat. Once inside, she sets the ring on the worktop and strips off her shirt, her jeans. She stands in front of the kitchen radiator in her pants and bra, phone in hand.
She goes to his credit card site. She has a legitimate reason, right? See how much he’s been fleeced and start to devise a plan to get the money back. She takes a deep breath and types:
Password123
What an eejit. She’s in right away. She scans the numbers, but nothing even close to the seven grand comes up. He must have bought it ages ago. She sighs. They’ll deal with it later, after going to the jeweller’s together.
She opens a new tab and types:
Engagement diamond ring fake scam
It comes up immediately. There’s even a picture of the ring. A forum explains how it works: someone sets up a jewellery company, gets random credit card billing addresses and sends out goods so they can be recorded as ‘delivered on time.’ Then, once they have enough of those, they’ll charge real jewellery prices to sell the fakes. By the time consumers realise they’ve been duped, the company has disappeared.
That means they have his credit card number. She goes back into his account, scans the lines of numbers when it suddenly dawns on her: the package was addressed to her. It’s her credit card and billing address that’s been compromised.
Sugar.
She’s just about to log out of his credit card when something catches her eye. A charge for €190 at the ‘Greedy Goose & Co. Bistro’ on January 10th. She distinctly remembers the day, she’d hosted a dry January dinner party which had only stayed dry for the first course. He was in Mallow for work that week. And no way is €190 even remotely within his company’s per diem.
She frowns, keeps the tab open and logs into her own credit card. Again, she scans the lines of numbers but nothing’s amiss. She goes back to his credit card and looks at the charge again. She googles ‘Greedy Goose & Co. Bistro.’ It has one Michelin star.
And it’s in Ballygananim.
She scrolls through the last ninety days. There’s another ‘Greedy Goose & Co. Bistro’ charge the night of her friend’s ‘Christmas jumpers and Cava’ party, which he’d also said he couldn’t go to because he was apparently working up in Letterkenny.
She puts her phone down. A sob rises in her throat, and she lets it come. It’s followed by another. And another.
She grabs the little red box from the worktop and throws it against the wall. It makes a thwack and clatters to the floor. The box falls open, the diamond gaudy and fake as ever.
She stares at it for a long moment before wiping the tears away. A feeling floods over her: as if her heart, her ribcage have been squeezed in copper wire and at last, the wiring is being pried away. Floating up into the sky.
Far, far away.
And she realises what the strange wire feeling was all these years. It was loneliness. Because it’s far lonelier to be with someone who makes you unhappy than it is to be on your own.
She types:
Your stuff will be in the hall tomorrow. Enjoy Ballygananim tonight.
Then she puts on her pajamas and settles onto the sofa. She turns on the second season of Schitt’s Creek. It’s going to be a good Valentine’s Day after all.
Cassie Smith-Christmas is originally from Virginia, USA and lives in Galway, Ireland. Her unpublished novel The Huguenot’s Chest was a winner in the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair and the Blue Pencil Agency’s Pitch Prize. She holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow, and her writing has appeared in Ireland, the UK, and US, including Southword, Crannóg, Gutter, Tangled Locks and The Wild Word. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a Forward Prize for Poetry, and shortlisted in The Best of Rural Writing 2023.