I want to start with the ring, because the ring is where most people start when I tell them this story, the ring being the most dramatic element and the one that people find easiest to form an opinion about. Five carats, emerald cut, set in platinum, housed in a box that probably cost more than my first car. Connor had opened the box at dinner at a restaurant I had not known existed before he took me there, a restaurant where the menu had no prices and the lighting was designed to make everyone look like the best version of themselves.
He had said, across a table with a centerpiece that cost more than my weekly grocery budget: “I think you know where this is going.”
I did know where it was going.
I had been dating Connor Walsh for seven months, and the ring had been expected for at least three of them, expected by my parents and my sister and by the general consensus of everyone in my life who had an opinion about what a smart woman in my position would do. Connor Walsh was fifty-one years old and he was the CEO of a regional construction and development company that my father had worked for as a project supervisor for sixteen years, and he was, by every external measure, a remarkable opportunity.
That is what my mother called him. An opportunity.
I looked at the ring in the restaurant with the lighting designed to make everyone look like the best version of themselves, and I thought about what I felt when I was with Connor, which was a very specific feeling, the feeling of being in the presence of someone who found me decorative, who spoke to me warmly and attentively but who was speaking, I always felt, to the idea of me rather than to me specifically, the way you speak to a nice painting that you are considering purchasing rather than to a person whose preferences and thoughts and specific self you are genuinely curious about.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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