Twenty-one years married, and in all that time neither of them had taken a ring off for longer than a shower. The jeweller wanted both at once — hers had worn thin at the back, his had gone too snug to clear the knuckle — and said, kindly, over the counter, that these things were easier done together. Ready at nine the next morning. One night, bare-handed, after two decades of not knowing what that even meant.
At dinner he kept doing it without noticing: thumbing the groove where the band used to sit, a pale dented line in skin he'd apparently never once really looked at. "You look like you lost a bet," she said. He turned his hand over on the tablecloth like evidence. "I look like I lost something," he said. "That's different."
She hadn't expected to feel it too — not the way he was playing it, dramatically bereft over the bread basket, but something smaller and stranger, low in her stomach, when he took her coat from the hook and his hand closed around her elbow with nothing on it. Just a hand. Nothing vouching for him.
In the dark hallway he put that hand flat against the small of her back, under her sweater, and she went still the way she used to go still for a stranger's hand — before she'd spent twenty-one years deciding exactly what his touch meant and filing it somewhere she wouldn't have to feel it fresh again. Tonight the filing didn't take.
"It's the same hand," she said, mostly to herself. "I should hope so," he said, not understanding yet, his palm still spread wide and warm against her spine like it was asking rather than announcing.
She caught his other hand before he could tuck it in his pocket out of habit, turned it palm-up under the hall light, and found the groove again — that pale seam running clean around the base of his finger, soft as a scar that had never had to heal from anything.
She drew her thumbnail along it once, slow, feeling for where it ended and the ordinary skin began, and he let out a breath like she'd found a nerve nobody had told her about in twenty-one years of looking.
"They're back at nine," she said, not moving her thumb. "I know what time it is," he said. Neither of them said anything about being in a hurry, and for one more unringed second his hand stayed exactly where she'd put it. Then it didn't.