The Fourth Step

June wears two rings every day: her engagement ring and her wedding band. They are the ones people notice. The one she would run back into a burning house for lives in a small dish by the bed, and it cost Theo less than dinner.

It is a promise ring. Thin, slightly bent, a little too big for her finger even then. He gave it to her on the stairs of their first apartment, on the fourth step, the one that creaks. She remembers the creak. Theo swears it was the landing. They have been arguing about this, gently, for eleven years.

Before there was anything to promise

They were broke. They had just come back from a party where neither of them knew anyone, and the stairwell smelled of someone else's dinner. Theo sat down, which he never does, and held out the ring without a box. He did not ask her anything. He said: this is me saying I am going to ask you one day, properly, when I can.

This is me saying I am going to ask you one day, properly, when I can.

He did ask, years later, with a ring that came in a box. June said yes to that one too. But the first ring was the one that made the second one possible. It was the promise before the promise.

Why it is the one she would save

The engagement ring and the wedding band are on her hand. If the house ever went up, they would go out the door with her. The promise ring would not, unless she went back for it. So she has decided, in the strange way you decide these things, that she would.

Somewhere along the way it stopped being jewellery and became an heirloom. Their daughter already knows the story, the stairs, the creak, the argument about the landing. One day the ring will be hers, and June hopes she will tell it the way June does: on the fourth step.