The Ring He Gave Me Was Meant for Another Woman

A week before the union of bloodlines, I found a sweet surprise.

Inside Lorenzo's wedding band, engraved in a hand so fine it caught the light only when tilted, was a single word. Addie. The name he'd whispered to me in the dark of the Romano estate, the soft thing he called me when no one with a gun was watching. I held the ring between my fingers there in the quiet of the jeweler's back room, the velvet box still warm from my palm, and I let myself believe. For five years I had been the daughter promised to settle a debt, a girl moved across a board for the honor of two fading lines.