Ezra kept frowning at her. Complicated, she said. Maybe it was — probably this sort of thing always felt that way. But he only had a few facts to contend with, and if he took them all at face value it didn't seem all that complicated to him. He had proposed to her, allegedly — so he must have loved her deeply, if he was willing to risk bringing someone else into this mess that was his life and his family and everything else. She said that he had tried to tell her about the curse — so he must have trusted her implicitly, more than he trusted anyone else he could think of aside from his siblings. And she had thrown the ring he'd bought for her in his face and ended their relationship.

What was more — she was standing in his house long after things had ended (months, years? he didn't know when this was all meant to have happened) looking at the floor while she talked about how he hadn't looked twice at her. That was certainly something — to still feel she was entitled to be the first person he looked at in any room, given everything she'd admitted to. (And, he thought, if this was the version of events that framed her most charitably...)

He leaned against the desk she'd just been looking through and shook his head. "I think you'd better go," he said. "I'm sorry you haven't found anything else suitable, but I don't think you'll find what you're looking for here. If what you're saying is true, I can't imagine I'd have wanted to keep the ring."

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