She woke up in the hotel at six in the morning with the particular clarity of someone who has made a decision they are at peace with, and the first thing she did was look at her left hand.
The engagement ring sat on her finger where it had been since Lucien had placed it there in a ceremony that had been elegant and entirely without spontaneity. Five carats, princess cut, a ring that any woman in their social circle would have envied. In her first life she had worn it until the day she was moved into the nursing home and the nurses had asked her to remove it for safety, and she had let them put it in a small paper envelope, and she had never found out what happened to it afterward.
She pulled it off now, in one clean motion, and held it in her palm and looked at it in the early morning light coming through the thin hotel curtains.
It was worth a great deal of money. She, at present, was worth very little.
