Page 48 of Now That It's You
“Exactly,” Meg said warily, not sure if Kyle was taking her side or luring her into some sort of complacency.
“But did you know there have been plenty of court cases where the bride has to give back the ring? The legal argument is that it was a conditional gift, contingent upon the marriage taking place, and the acceptance of the proposal is an agreement to those terms. If the wedding doesn’t happen, the conditions haven’t been met and the ring goes back to the giver.”
Meg folded her arms over her chest. “Not that it’s any of your business, but I researched this when we called off the wedding. There’s something called a fault-based approach where the courts determine who caused the broken engagement and the other person keeps the ring.”
“So you’re saying it was Matt’s fault?”
Meg took another shaky breath, wishing she didn’t feel the thick bubble of temper flaring at the base of her neck. “I’m saying a guy who tells his bride the night before the wedding that he’s been sticking his dick in his acupuncturist might be considered at fault for the fact that the wedding didn’t happen.”
She saw Kyle flinch and felt a twinge of guilt for bringing up his dead brother’s dick, but he seemed to recover. “No one’s disputing that a portion of the fault was Matt’s. But he was the one who chose to come clean instead of keeping the secret from you. He made a mistake, and then he tried to atone for it. It was your choice not to forgive him.”
Meg glared. “So you’re saying the whole thing was my fault because I’m the one who didn’t forgive and forget?”
“That’s not what I said.” Kyle scrubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “But I do think you earned at least a little blame for dumping him in the most public fashion imaginable. You could have just postponed the wedding, maybe tried joint counseling or something.”
Meg stood up, blazing now. “You think I did it to humiliate him? You honestly think I didn’t stand there at the front of that church praying to God to give me the strength to just forgive him and go through with it? You think I didn’t have every intention of saying ‘I do’ until the last possible second when every fiber of my being screamed ‘I can’t!’ and I had no choice but to run?”
“I don’t?—”
“You want the goddamn ring back? You can have it. It’s in my jewelry box.”
“Meg, wait?—”
She whirled again to face him, too angry to tamp down her temper now. “Do you know why I still have it?” she snapped, fists clenched at her side. “After we got engaged, I took it to a jeweler to see if I could have the white gold replaced with something that didn’t have nickel in it. Stainless steel or something affordable. I kept having allergic reactions to the gold, but I didn’t tell Matt because I didn’t want him to feel bad.”
“Meg—”
“You know what the jeweler told me? It’s not real.”
“What?” He stared at her, his face registering the same shock she’d felt that afternoon in the jewelry store.
“The diamond. The ‘big ol’ rock’ Matt was always bragging about giving me? It’s something else, not even a real diamond.”
“Cubic zirconia?”
“No, something else. I think it’s called moissanite. The thing is, I didn’t care. I never wanted a big huge diamond. I didn’t want a diamond at all.”
“What did you want?”
“I didn’t care!” She threw her hands in the air, annoyed with herself for the torrent of words spilling from her mouth, but she felt powerless to stop them. “I would have been happy with a beach agate or a piece of glass. Or I would have really enjoyed having something special, like my grandmother’s birthstone. Something to show he paid attention to my life and to the things that really mattered to me.”
“What was your grandma’s birthstone?”
“A sapphire.” Meg shook her head, afraid they were getting lost now in the insignificant details. “That’s not the point. To have him lie to me about it. To have him pretending the ring or his feelings or our relationship was something it wasn’t?—”
She broke off there and clasped her hands together in her lap, letting the words hang between them for a moment. A stupid, silly part of her felt like crying, but she ordered herself to hold it together. “I never told anyone that. About the ring, I mean.”
“That you knew the stone wasn’t real?”
She nodded, blinking hard until the threat of tears had faded. “Not even Matt.”
“Not Kendall?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t want them to think my own fiancé thought so little of me that he’d lie about something that never mattered to me in the first place.” Her shoulders sagged as fatigue set in. She was just so tired of this. “Anyway, you can have the ring back. I’ll go get it.”
She started to move that direction, but Kyle stood up and grabbed her hand. “Meg, I don’t want the ring. That’s not why I brought it up.”
She looked down at her hand in his, staring at their interlaced fingers as though they might hold a clue how she should feel about all this. When she looked back at Kyle, he was watching her with an intensity that made heat rise in her cheeks.
