“The cleaning crew found something.” His eyes dropped to a small plastic bag he was holding, the kind you’d use to keep a receipt dry. “It was wedged down behind the booth cushion. They almost missed it.”
He held it out to me.
Then he didn’t let go.
“I’m sorry about last night,” he said. “I should have checked the cameras when you asked. And after seeing this—” He stopped. Swallowed. “I think you need to see this.”
He released the bag.
Inside it was a gold ring.
For a second I forgot how to breathe.
I knew that ring the way you know your own handwriting. The thin band, scratched near the setting from twenty-three years of dishwater and doorknobs and everyday living. Three tiny diamonds circling a pale blue stone. One gold prong, bent slightly inward, the way it had been since she caught it on a sweater sleeve years ago and never had it fixed because she liked, she said, that it had a little history in it.
My mother had worn that ring every single day for twenty-three years. She slept in it. She showered in it. She kneaded bread dough with it still on her finger, flour caking into the setting, and I used to tease her about washing it properly. When she vanished, we found her purse untouched, her clothes untouched, her medication untouched.
The ring was the one thing that had gone missing along with her.
“You recognize it,” Jett said quietly.
I nodded, because I couldn’t get words out yet. Of course he recognized it too — I’d shown its photo to every single person I worked with, over and over, in case any of them ever crossed paths with it.
My fingers closed around the little bag until the plastic crinkled.
The couple from table twelve — the ones who’d eaten a $407 dinner and disappeared into the night — had been carrying the one thing my mother still had on her body the day she disappeared.
Whatever had happened to her, these two people knew something.
