Jane for twenty minutes and I had no idea, except for my younger brother, a nine-year-old could look so intense during a conversation. Echo talks, Jane talks, and they both have their feet in the pool. Echo offers Jane her arm and my heart stops as Echo nods her head in encouragement for Jane to touch.
Jane’s hesitant as she reaches for Echo’s skin, but she does touch and Echo smiles as if that moment wasn’t huge for either of them. When I first met Echo, she wouldn’t let anyone see her scars, much less touch them. Pride swells within me and I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with this woman.
The cell in my hands vibrates, and a text message pops along the top. Isaiah: You’ve got problems.
The muscles in my neck tense because the last fucking thing I need is problems. I’m done with problems, and any time Isaiah is the messenger, it means my world is about to go to hell. What?
Three dots as Isaiah types and the wait kills me. If something was wrong with my brothers, Carrie and Joe, their adoptive parents, would contact me, so this is an internal family problem.
Isaiah and I created a tight family of friends and my mind is racing with the possibilities of who could be in trouble and why. Did something happen to Abby, Isaiah’s girl, Rachel, or West’s girlfriend, Haley? West had a fight this week—did it go bad? The son of a bitch has been on a winning streak and he has a mean right hook that scares even me, but it doesn’t mean he couldn’t take a bad hit in the ring.
Logan’s had it tough lately and we just learned about his health problems. Wouldn’t shock me if it’s him. He’s looked like a damn zombie the past two times I’ve seen him, and until Abby is back home, he’ll probably continue to look like a living dead man. Beth and Ryan were supposed to go to Tennessee with her uncle and aunt on a fast trip before college began. Did something happen to them?
Isaiah: Lila contacted Rachel. Lila messed up and told Echo she thought you were going to propose on the trip. Lila thought you were doing the original plan of asking her at the beginning of the week and was fishing for Echo to tell her she was engaged. The fishing backfired. Echo now knows.
Damn. And I bet Echo’s now expecting a diamond ring. It was going to be bad enough to propose to Echo without a diamond, but at least I had the element of surprise. Bet she has guessed how the night is supposed to go—Echo in her favorite dress, me in a white shirt and tie, dinner by the ocean, dancing at the restaurant under the stars, a walk on the pier, and me down on one knee asking her to spend the rest of her life with me.
Only in her head, I’d be offering what the entire world expects. I reach into my drawstring pack in the beach bag and at the very bottom is a small black velvet box. With the box still in the beach bag, I open it.
The claddagh ring is sterling silver, and the stone in the center is emerald colored. My father’s mother had Irish roots and because of that, my father gave my mother a claddagh ring for Christmas once. At the time, they had been married for years.
When Dad got down on one knee, he gave Mom a diamond engagement ring, but I’m doing the best I can. Two months–plus of my salary isn’t worth shit to begin with and what I had saved for Echo’s ring is now paying for the medical care of Abby’s grandmother. I don’t regret it, but it still doesn’t help me feel worthy of proposing to Echo.
But then I saw this ring. Dad told me people sometimes used claddagh rings as engagement rings. There are plenty of expensive claddagh rings out there with real stones instead of colored ones like the one in my hand, with real gold instead of sterling silver and that cost more than a hundred dollars, but this is what I could barely afford.
Echo says it’s the thought that counts and I’m banking on that. Banking she’ll listen to my story and will permit me to place this ring on her left hand with the heart toward her fingertips as a show that she’s promised to spend the rest