“Yeah. How did you know?”
“The shoulders. The thighs. I've dressed half of the Marlies. You need a custom cut.” He pats my arm. “Come back tomorrow afternoon. I'll have something for you. What colour?”
“I don't know. Something... good? Something that looks like I belong next to someone really elegant?”
He looks at me for a long moment, his eyes softening behind his glasses. “Charcoal. Trust me.”
I give him a deposit, and I walk back out onto Spadina feeling slightly less like I’m walking to my own funeral and slightly more like I might, conceivably, pull this off.
The rings are harder than the suit.
I know this going in, because a suit is just fabric and measurements and a seventy-year-old man on Spadina who pats your arm and tells you to trust him. A ring is a promise. Even a fake promise is still a circle of metal that goes on someone's finger and stays there, and there's something about the permanence of a circle that makes my chest do complicated things I am not prepared to unpack on a Monday afternoon on Queen Street West.
I've been walking. The cold is brutal, the kind of Toronto February cold that crawls inside your jacket and sets up camp in your bones, and my ears are burning and my nose is running, and I should go home. I should go home and eat another Uncrustable and lie on the couch with Oliver and stare at the ceiling and quietly spiral about the fact that I’m flying to India in just a couple days to pretend to be engaged to a man whose forearms I think about with a frequency that would concern a licensed psychologist.
But I told Arjun I'd handle the rings. And Casey Wellingdoesn’t say he'll handle something and then not handle it. That’s the one thing I have going for me in this entire catastrophic operation: I’m reliable. I’m the guy who shows up. I’m the guy who splints the fracture and mops the vomit and holds the crying kid and says, “I've got you,” and means it every single time. I will not be the guy who shows up to a fake engagement in India without rings.
So I walk into a jewelry shop.
It's a small place, tucked between a vintage bookstore and a ramen restaurant that I've been meaning to try for months because someone at the hospital told me their Tonkotsu is transcendent. The shop window is modest, just a few pieces on dark velvet, nothing flashy, nothing that screams money or high fashion. It looks like the kind of place where things are made by hand, with care, by someone who pays attention to the details.
The bell above the door chimes. The shop is warm after the street, and it smells like metal polish and something faintly woody, and the cases are filled with rings and bracelets and pendants arranged with the kind of thoughtful precision that reminds me, with a pang, of the way Arjun arranges his surgical tray.
The woman behind the counter looks up. She is somewhere in her fifties, with reading glasses pushed up on her head and silver rings on every finger and the calm, steady energy of someone who works with her hands all day and has made peace with the world's chaos.
“Hi,” I say. “I need rings. Two of them. Engagement rings.”
She smiles. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks. It's, uh.” I almost say it's fake. The words are right there, sitting on my tongue, ready to launch. But something stops me. Maybe it's the warmth of the shop. Maybe it's the way she's looking at me, patient and kind, the way people look at you when they can tell you're nervous and they're giving you room to be nervous in. Maybe it's the fact that saying it's fake out loud, in a place that smells like hand-polished metal and care, feels like a lie that's bigger than the one I'm actually telling.
“It's complicated,” I say instead.
“It always is,” she says, and I almost laugh, because that is the exact same thing the tailor on Spadina said, and apparently every small business owner in Toronto has arrived at the same philosophical conclusion about love.
“I'm Maria,” she says. “Tell me about the other person.”
And this is where it gets dangerous. Because Maria asks the question simply, the way you'd ask someone what they want for dinner, and my brain, which has been running a background process labelled ARJUN KAPOOR: COMPREHENSIVE EMOTIONAL CRISIS for approximately two years, takes this as an invitation to crash the entire system.
“He's a neurosurgeon,” I say. “Paediatric. He's brilliant. Like, scary brilliant. He operates on children's brains, and his hands never shake, except when they do, and he hides it, and he thinks nobody notices, but I notice every time.” I’m looking at a tray of rings and not seeing any of them. “He's precise. About everything. He folds his socks. He arranges his pens by ink colour. He once sent me a three-page email about proper supply closet organization, with footnotes and a bibliography.” I pause. Swallow. “He has green eyes. He smells like citrus soap. He's the most beautiful person I've ever met, and he has absolutely no idea, which somehow makes it worse.”
Maria is leaning on the counter with her chin in her hand, her expression soft and warm and entirely too knowing for a woman I met forty-five seconds ago.
“Honey,” she says, “that doesn't sound complicated. That sounds like you're in love.”
I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again.
“I need two rings,” I say, because I have no idea how to respond to that and retreating into logistics is apparently a thing I've picked up from Arjun, which is either concerning or inevitable. “Simple. Nothing too flashy. He'd hate flashy. Something... clean. Elegant. Something that looks like it belongs on a surgeon's hand.”
She nods, disappearing beneath the counter for a moment, and comes back with a velvet tray. Six bands, all different. Silver, gold, platinum, brushed, polished, matte.
I look at them. I pick up a brushed platinum band, thin and clean and understated. It catches the light like a scalpel edge. I hold it between my thumb and forefinger, turning it, and I think about Arjun's hands. The narrow fingers. The precise, manicured nails. The way they clasp behind his back when he's afraid, and how they tremble after a twelve-hour surgery. The way one of them held mine in a chaotic kitchen in Kensington Market while a Goldendoodle snored under the table and neither of us said a word about what it meant.
“This one,” I say. “For him. And something similar for me, but...” I look at my hand. Broad. Scarred. Calloused from years of hockey sticks and splints and holding things together. “Wider, maybe. I've got big hands.”
“I noticed,” Maria says, with a smile that suggests she noticed several other things too, none of which she's going to say out loud because she is a kind and merciful woman.
She pulls a wider band from the tray. Same platinum. Same brushed finish. It looks like the first ring's bigger, sturdier sibling. The ring that played defence and took the hits so the delicate one could do the detail work.