When Lonnie came up behind me and whispered, “Boo,” I nearly hit my head against the painted face of the little redheaded girl. I was stunned by her sudden reappearance, and standing, I realized, far too close. An alarm sounded, a rapid bleep that made everyone in the room turn. A guard peeked around the corner. “Sorry,” Lonnie said to him, already starting to laugh at me. “She tripped.”

As we made our way out of the room, her arm in mine, my cheeks flushed and my back dripping with sweat, she whispered, joking, “I can’t take you anywhere.”

ALONE, BACK AT THE BROWNSTONE THAT DAY, I FOUND A RING. A strange item, not in her jewelry box, but in a small butter cookie tin from Saint-Malo shoved in the back of the closet in her office. The ring was the only thing in the tin, just rattling around in there. It was cheap metal, adjustable, like a trinket from one of those candy machines outside pizza shops and corner stores that sat dirty, full of stale hot tamales and gumballs and junk in little plastic eggs. On top, the metal was bent into a chunky heart frame inside of which was a glittered lime background with a tiny outline of the Virgin Mary, her hands open and welcoming, her smiling face looking down, a little askew, her usual pose—like she is above you, but magnanimous, accepting.

Knowing that shade of lime, I held the ring up to Lonnie’s desk lamp, then cupped my hands together around it, peeking in with one eye. Sure enough, it glowed in the dark, a faint green shine inside my hands. I slipped it onto my index finger and it fit without my having to bend the metal at all. I liked the way it looked on my hand. I liked the weirdness of the object. Where had it come from? It was childish, but too big for a child’s finger. It was religious, but also seemed like a joke, the way you could make the holy Virgin glow. It was clunky and gaudy and cheap, not something you would see Lonnie wear now, so what was it doing in her house?

I thought of her as a teenager, punctuating her style with weird accents like this. I already knew I was taking it home with me, but I pulled out her photo album again, looking for the picture of Lonnie in her coat, in front of the school bus, with her hand up by her temple. Her fingers were laced in her hair, but you could see, on her index finger, her right hand, the same one I’d slipped it on without thinking, a flash of metal, thick and clunky.