The Nanny Wore My Wedding Ring
by Ava Sterling
I came home from the clinic two days early. The nanny was singing my daughter to sleep — and she was wearing my wedding ring. Not a copy. Mine.
They told everyone I had been resting in the Berkshires. I had been at Fallow Hill for forty-seven days, and on the first night they took the drawstrings out of my clothes. I came home two days early because I wanted one ordinary afternoon. The gate code had been changed. My reading chair was gone. My father's auction catalogues had been boxed and taped in the second week of July — five days after I was admitted, and nobody packs a woman's library on day five of a rest. Upstairs, the new nanny was singing my daughter to sleep with my mother's song, and Poppy looked at me the way you look at a stranger in a supermarket and turned her face away. On Sabine's left hand was my wedding ring. Not a copy: the 1911 Cavanaugh band, the chipped girdle at four o'clock, the little lark my father cut by hand the night before I married Theo. They gave me a ring back from the clinic and it fit perfectly and the engraving inside was flawless, and that is how I knew. Every word I say now is a symptom. My name is on no list in my own house. On Monday a lawyer is coming with papers. They have all forgotten what I do for a living.
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