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It’s only when he gets inside -ears ringing, world knocked upside down and sideways up - that he realises he’s still holding her ring. He’d taken it from her without even thinking, some tangible thing to prove to himself all of it was actually happening.
He should go back: give it back to her, talk to her, explain-
“Are you all right, my love?” Pam is coming down the stairs. He quickly shoves the ring in his pocket. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”
“Yeah, fine. Sonia- Sonia’s just gone.”
“Oh, I know. Such a shame she couldn’t stay, eh.” She sighs dolefully, then brightens within a few seconds. “Oh well! Listen, come on- you gotta show me how to use this Kindling thing Mick got me cos I haven’t got a clue - all I asked for was Mrs Hinch’s book!”
Gavin comes back in after a couple of minutes. He keeps watching the door, jumping at every creak of the old terrace, but Nessa never comes back. He’s restless, fidgety, caught between pretending everything is fine and normal and going to find her and have this all of out properly.
But he stays for Neil’s sake, instead putting away half of one of his selection boxes out of pure stress. Her ring feels burning hot against his leg.
-
He and Neil do the Boxing Day Dip in the bay with Bryn, Mick, and Jason, the freezing cold water bracing and at least a little bit clarifying after a restless night.
After they hug goodbye, Smithy’s left outside while Neil runs into his house - ready to lose the rest of Boxing Day to his Xbox.
He should just get on the road.
It’s not like she’s seeking him out, and it’s not like he’s never going to talk to her again. He’ll talk to her at some point about Neil anyway. He can just - sort everything out then. Somehow.
And Sonia already rang him twice to check what time he was leaving, somewhat gently suggesting he could leave earlier.
He should just go. He really should just go.
“You all right there, Smithy?” Bryn’s voice makes him jump, his arms and face hanging out from above the curtain of the upstairs window. “You look like a lost soul wandering around in the road like that.”
“All right Brynlar. No, yeah, I was just- gonna come in and talk to Nessa a sec before I head off.” Then, he tacks on: “About Neil. The baby.”
“Ah, she left early this morning I’m afraid - she was going to come with us to the bay but the boys from Goldie Lookin Chain are passing through town today and they absolutely insisted on ‘a jam sesh’, as I believe the kids call it.” Fuck. “Was it urgent? I can take a message if you just let me get my little notebook and pen now.”
He hears muted sounds of water sloshing even from seven feet below - Bryn’s in the bath. “No, you’re alright, don’t worry. I’ll just call… or text, or something.”
“Are you sure now? I don’t mind! Or I could always see if I can pinpoint her location on Find My Friends ? Do you know about it, Smithy? It’s this terrific mobile phone ‘app’ where you can find your-”
“Honestly, don’t trouble yourself. It’s fine.”
“Right you are. Did you want me to let her know you were looking for her?”
“No!” he says sharply, automatically. He swallows. “No, really. No need. I’ll just call her myself- later.”
“All right then, good sir. You’re the boss!” He waves through the window. “Safe travels now! Say shwmae, llawer o gariad to Sonia for me.”
“Will do.” Or he would, if he could remember what Neil told him any of those words meant from his school Welsh lessons. “In a bit, Bryn.”
Smithy sits in his car, staring out in front of him at Trinity Street. He fishes her ring out of his jeans pocket. Even considers just posting it through the letterbox for her to find.
“Without even talking to her. Real dickhead move, that is,” he mutters to himself. “Shit idea.”
Looking at it properly for the first time, he squints at the inscription: To Vanessa, love Granddad.
He drops his head to the steering wheel, scaring himself when it beeps. As if it couldn’t get any worse she wanted him to have an hairloom ring. Fuck, he really needs to talk to her, in person. He opens the car door, half resolved to get Bryn to use Find My Friends on her after all.
Then his phone rings.
“Hi bobos,” he says, trying not to sound guilty even with one foot half out the car.
“I’m not being funny, Neil, but have you actually left yet? This is the third time I’m ringing you and you’re still just dicking around in Wales-”
He closes the door, turns the key in the engine.“I’m literally on my way right now.”
The ring returns to his pocket. It’ll have to wait.
-
A moment after setting foot on the gravel drive, he’s hit with a wall of Sonia’s familiar perfume (that he doesn’t like, would never say) and Sonia’s hugging him so tightly he nearly falls backwards.
“Yes! Yes! My answer’s yes, Neil! Oh my god, I’m so happy!”
“Answer?” he repeats, trying to put the pieces together of a conversation they haven’t had yet. “What-“
She lets him go, beaming.
“Of course I’ll marry you, you big lump!” Right. Proposal. Marriage. To… Sonia. She goes on, biting her lipglossed lip and batting her eyelashes. “So I was a little bit naughty after we spoke before…. Grandpa said a package arrived addressed to you and so I peeked- I found the ring, Neil!”
His genius two-in-one present idea suddenly doesn’t seem so genius anymore.
“Right, yeah. The ring. The ring I got you.”
This is what he wanted, this is definitely what he wanted. A little preparation time would have been nice, but the end result is the same. What he wanted- wants . Last night changed nothing.
“You’re not mad, are you, baby? You did say it was going to be something for me so I couldn’t resist, then I just got carried away in all the excitement.”
“No, ‘course not. It’s just that-”
“Great! Don’t worry I left it in the box after I tried it on.” She grabs his hand and pulls him towards the house. “Since you’ll propose properly later anyway, after family dinner tonight. My nail tech is coming over in a bit to touch up my nails for the photos. It’s really short notice obviously, but I made it work.” Sonia shrugs, then laughs. “‘It’ being my nail tech.”
His brain takes an age to catch up. “Wait, propose properly?”
“Well, yeah. You know: the whole down-on-one-knee, the love speech and all that. We have to do that, babe. Plus, my cousin Shiree will be there - trying to get everyone to feel her bump all the time like she’s the first woman ever to get pregnant. Urgh. She’s honestly, like, so attention seeking. I need some big news for everyone to talk about for a change.” She looks back at him, then stops to cup his cheek affectionately. “And we need a good proposal story to tell people when they ask, right, baby? It’ll be a perfect memory for us, for the start of our new lives together!”
He hasn’t even told Neil the baby about it yet, that he’s getting a new stepmum that he only met properly yesterday. And the only person who actually does know -Gav- didn’t seem all that keen on the idea. And Nessa-
(No, Smithy, you’re not listening. With all my heart. Marry me.)
Smithy just nods, feeling like he’s somewhere else entirely. It’s less complicated than explaining why it really wasn’t a good time anymore. Sonia beams again. At least he can make one person happy.
-
“Oh.” Gav seems to hear his own blank tone, injecting more enthusiasm into his next sentence. “I mean, that’s-that’s great news, mate. I’m really happy for ya. So you really asked her then?”
“No.” A confused beat. “I mean, not at first, and then yeah. Yeah, I asked her.”
Sonia had given him a deliberate prompting look the moment the spoons went down around the table on the Christmas puddings, then a gentle but distinct tap on his shin with her high heel when he didn’t get up fast enough.
He hadn’t managed to think of any decent ideas for a speech in the couple of hours since she asked him to do it, so ended up on one knee with an efficient but uninspired: “Sonia, will you, um… marry me?”
(On any other day it would have been easy to come up with some solid gold, Hallmark-eat-your-heart-out type shit, he reasons to himself afterwards. Not today though.)
A flicker of disappointment flashed in her eyes before she heard the room gasp, then cried “yes!” with real gusto, putting the effort in for both of them.
Smithy looks out over the expansive garden that looks more like a small park, swapping his phone from one ear to the other. He can see Sonia inside, excitedly showing the ring off to a heavily pregnant lady. She really is beautiful when she’s happy.
“Is that Smithy? Hiya Smithy!” Stacey says in the background. “Aw, we miss you, we do. Harri and Neil the Baby were playing football in the park before and he looked right smart in his new kit. How’s it going at Sonia’s? With all her family and that?”
“All right, Stace.” He smiles. “Good, yeah. It’s good. You’d love it here, really posh. It’s like a hotel. Freestanding bath tub in the ensuite and everything.”
“Aw, lush! I keep telling Gav we should get one of those but he says our bathroom isn’t big enough, but I think if we just rearranged a bit we could-”
“Aren’t you going tell Stacey your… big news, mate?”
“Tell me what? Oh my god, what’s happened?”
He only just stops a defeated sigh escaping. Any hope of being able to break it gently to everyone himself -to Neil, to Nessa - goes up in smoke. Stacey’s like his second little sister, but she can’t keep a secret to save her life. It’ll be halfway around Barry and well on its way to Billericay before he puts the phone down.
“Oh right. Well, um. We’re getting married.” He stops, then adds -like it wasn’t clear: “Me and Sonia.”
Stacey gasps. He’s expecting an excitable monologue to follow about how amazing it is and how she just loves weddings she does and can Caitlin and Megan be bridesmaids - but it never comes. Eventually: “Oh! That is- I can’t believe you did it. I mean, proposing to someone is… massive, like.”
In the darkness, he sees black rimmed eyes looking up at him, a ring that’s still in his pocket outstretched in front of him. He can count on one hand -and not need more than half his fingers- the number of times he’s seen her really vulnerable in twelve whole years.
It scares the absolute shit out of him, truthfully. Being trusted with it. Knowing this is already going to fuck it up.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “Massive.”
-
As predicted, the texts roll in soon after- Bryn, then Mick, then Budgie, then Pete, then Gary and Simon, then Dirtbox. Even Deano puts together a bunch of letters that look the vaguest bit like ‘congratulations’.
Most are asking if it’s true at all which he tries not to be offended by. He doesn’t remember Gav getting anything but congratulations after he got engaged, a thousand times quicker than he has.
He hears nothing from Nessa, though he wasn’t expecting to.
-
The ring -the other ring, her ring- lives in Smithy’s pocket for a long time. It’s weird that he still has it. It’s really weird that he hasn’t spoken to her since it happened.
Every day that goes by he gets more and more wound up with it all, hovering over her name in his phone, trying to think of what the hell he should say. One time his finger even slips and it dials, and he just about drops his phone in his haste to cancel the call. It doesn’t feel like a conversation they should have on the phone, but it’s not like he’s rushing to have it in person either.
He knows she knows about Sonia. The engagement. Everyone does, now.
And she’s outside smoking when he pulls up. His throat feels like it’s closing up. It’s all eerily similar to the last time he saw her, just in daylight and on the other side of the road.
“All righ’, how’s it going?”
“Good!” he says- too quickly, voice squeaky. “Yeah. Good. You?”
She takes a long drag on her cigarette, with a thousand yard stare beyond him. “I’m all right, as it goes.”
He wasn’t sure what he was expecting, seeing her for the first time after… everything. But it’s more like nothing’s happened at all. It throws him entirely, any bare ideas he’d had about how to broach the situation totally lost.
Instead, he ends up just opening his mouth then closing it again uselessly. It doesn’t seem like she even notices.
“Dad!” Bryn’s front door opens and Neil the Baby barrels towards him, grinning. It is, as always, enough to make him forget all his problems. At least for a while.
“That’s my boy!” Smithy sweeps him up in a bear hug, swinging his legs. “I swear you grow another inch every time I see ya, eh!”
When he puts Neil down, he catches a strange look in her eyes he’s never seen before. It’s gone before he can work out what it is.
“So, um,” he starts. “We’re going to this trampoline park thing in Cardiff that Neil the baby found online, if you- if you wanted to come or-”
“No.” She crushes her cigarette under the toe of her boot. “I left the sport behind at the ‘04 Olympic trials when I landed my last barani ball out. Besides, I have to open up down the slots.”
“Right, ‘course. No worries.”
Neil peers over at his car. “I thought you said Sonia was coming, Dad?”
Nessa raises one eyebrow. He’s the one to look away this time.
“Sorry, mate. She couldn’t make it in the end, a family thing.”
Technically, it’s true. The golf club was having another charity function thing she had to go to with her dad. (“ It’s for charity… you understand, don’t you, baby .”)
“Am I gonna be your best man with Uncle Gavin?”
Nessa’s face remains impassive.
“I… haven’t really thought about it,” he says honestly. He’s barely thought about anything to do with his own proposal and what was to come since it happened, not even his stag. “But yeah, definitely! You are the best little man I know, after all.”
“Tidy,” Neil says, sounding so much like Nessa it nearly knocks him sideways. Smithy sees more and more of her in him as he grows up. It’s mad, but it surprises him how glad he is about it.
“I guess we should get going then, buddy. Get out from under your mum’s feet and that.”
He’s fishing in his pocket for the car keys when fingers hit a much differently shaped cool piece of metal. It stops him in his tracks.
When he turns back, she’s staring back at him already - and it’s the first time since he arrived that it seems like she even remembers what happened not even two weeks ago.
Something -a feeling, a sense of something - passes between them. And an instinct hits him to go to her and-
“Dad! Come on! We’re gonna miss the booking!”
Nessa inclines her head, indicating he should go. So he nods, just slightly, but it’s still like he’s doing something wrong. On a fundamental level, something isn’t right. He just doesn’t know what it is or how to fix it.
It’s as close as they get to addressing it.
-
As time goes on, the whole thing starts to feel like a weird dream he had once. It might as well be, for all he could make sense of it. Nessa… loving him. Wanting to marry him.
It lives in a little back corner of his brain, strangely vivid, recalled more often than he’d like.
It’s easy to fall back into their usual rhythms, established over a decade plus change of the strangest co-parenting arrangement the world has ever seen. It’s very nearly normal again, whatever ‘normal’ is for them.
Except-
Nothing is quite the same as before. He can sense they’ve lost something, an easiness to their interactions they’d once had. He’s holding back, and so is she.
It can’t be helped, he tells himself. Either the moment’s gone to talk about it or he’s too chickenshit to do it, but either way. This is where they are. They co-parent and he’s marrying Sonia. That’s what there is.
And he still has the ring. It’s the only physical proof he has he didn’t imagine the whole thing which makes it comforting in a way he can’t put his finger on.
“Nice bit of clobber, mate,” Gav says, when they meet at The Dolphin one evening. “You getting into practice for the real thing or somethin’?”
“Hm?”
Gav nods at his hand resting on his pint. Nessa’s ring glints up at him, on his left ring finger of all places. Smithy panics, rushing to take it off so quickly he’s sure nearly dislocates his own knuckle.
He’s not even totally sure how it ended up there. His habit of twisting it around in his pocket when he’s bored, or distracted, or tired, or anything else, apparently here to bite him on the arse.
“Bit bigger than your usual wedding band though,” Gav continues, amused. “Doesn’t seem like Sonia’s style either.”
“Found it on a job site, didn’t I?” he lies, pocketing it again. “I was just gonna- I was gonna- give it to the homeowner but I…forgot.”
Gavin is skeptical. “And thought you’d give it a quick test drive. Right.”
Thankfully, the subject changes, to the rumours that a national lockdown was coming in the next couple of weeks. He’s never been so relieved to talk about potentially losing most of his income and the ability to see his son.
Smithy takes it out of his pocket when he gets home the next day. He can’t keep it around anymore -thank god it was Gav that caught him with it and not, well… anyone else- and the moment seems to have passed to give it back to her.
“Neil?” Sonia’s voice comes from downstairs. “I’m looking at colour schemes, can you come help please?”
He runs his thumb over the inscription and complicated design, stomach churning. That feeling that something is wrong, missing even - is back. “Yeah, just give me a sec.”
“No, now, Neil,” she shouts back. Then, softer: “Please, babe.”
He takes a box down from one of the shelves in the spare room, full of bits and bobs he’d shoved in from his room in his mum’s house. He places it carefully in the bottom, covers it with a battered sheet of paper, and puts it back on the shelf.
Out of sight, out of mind after all, supposedly. He just has to hope it works.