The Wedding Ring That Isn't Mine

It was in a jam jar of assorted buttons and haberdashery oddments, the kind of lot you buy for fifty pence because you sew and you never know. Sorting the buttons at my kitchen table, I found a gold band among them — a plain wedding ring, worn smooth, clearly old, obviously mixed in by accident when someone's effects were bundled for the charity shop. Too big for me; it spun loose even on my thumb. I put it on my little finger to keep it safe while I finished sorting, meaning to hand it back to the shop, and forgot about it.

In the morning it fit my ring finger. Snugly. Correctly. As if made for it.

I want to be precise, because this is the part that people disbelieve and I don't blame them: the ring was demonstrably too large the night before — it fell off my thumb twice while I sorted buttons. In the morning it was on my left ring finger, which I do not remember moving it to, sized to that finger exactly, and it would not come off. Not with soap, not with cold water, not with the elevation-and-string trick the internet suggests. It sits there now, comfortable, permanent, a wedding band on the wedding finger of a woman who has never married.

The dreams started the same night. I dream, now, most nights, of a marriage I never had — a specific man, whose face I know better than my own family's though I have never met him, a house I could draw the floor plan of, a life of small ordinary domestic decades: arguments about a leaking gutter, a holiday by a grey sea, his hands, older each dream, on a garden fork. They are not nightmares. They are the warm, worn dreams of a long happy marriage, and I wake from them grieving, every morning, for a husband and a life that are not mine and never were, and the grief is real, and it lasts until midday, and then the ring on my finger catches the light and I feel, God help me, married.

I've traced what I can. The charity shop couldn't tell me whose effects the button jar came from. But I dream of the same man, the same house, aging across the nights in sequence, a marriage playing out in order — and last week, for the first time, in the dream, he was very old and very ill, and he held my hand, which was old too, and he said 'not long now, love,' and I woke up sobbing for a man I've never met.

I don't know what happens to me, or to the dreams, when the marriage in them ends. I don't know whose ring this is, or whose life I'm being made to finish. I've stopped trying to get the ring off. It clearly has somewhere it needs me to be, and someone it needs me to sit with to the end, and I've decided — I don't know how else to live with it — to see her marriage through for her. It's the strangest kindness I've ever been conscripted into. He held my hand last night. He's very tired. I don't think it's long now.