She notices it in the mirror—first as a faint wrongness, then as a jolt that tightens her breath. Her ring finger is bare. Smooth. Pale where the gold should be. For a moment she simply stares, as if the band might reappear if she looks hard enough, the way a misplaced word sometimes snaps back into memory.

Three years. Nearly three years without a single night, shower, or grocery‑store run when she’d taken it off. The ring had become a part of her hand, as familiar as the tiny freckle on her knuckle. And now it’s gone.

She sits on the edge of the tub, mascara wand still in hand, and begins the quiet inventory of possibilities.

Maybe it slipped off while she was washing her hands yesterday—she’d been rushing, distracted, thinking about errands and emails. But she can’t imagine the band simply sliding away without her noticing. It had always fit snugly, a warm circle of certainty.

Or—she hates the thought—did someone remove it while she slept? The idea is absurd, melodramatic even, but the absence feels so deliberate, so impossible, that her mind wanders into strange corners. She pictures herself asleep, unaware, while some unseen hand lifts the ring from her finger with surgical care.

Then another possibility flickers through her mind, the kind that arrives only when the world feels slightly tilted. What if she’s slipped sideways into some neighboring universe? One where she never married, where the ceremony never happened, where the gold band never existed at all. She imagines waking up in a life that looks almost identical to her own—same apartment, same toothbrush, same half‑finished cup of tea on the counter—but missing one essential thread.

She presses her thumb to the empty place on her finger. The skin remembers the shape of the ring even if the world does not.

And in that quiet moment, she realizes the search isn’t just for a piece of gold. It’s for reassurance that her life is still the one she knows—still the one she chose.

She stays in the bathroom longer than she needs to, as if the mirror might eventually offer an explanation. Instead it gives her only her own face—steady enough, but with a faint tremor beneath the surface, like a reflection in water.

What does one do when a symbol of permanence simply vanishes?

She checks the sink, the floor, the pockets of yesterday’s jeans. She lifts the bathmat, shakes out the towel, even peers into the small gap between the vanity and the wall where dust gathers in secret. Nothing. The absence feels intentional, as though the ring has chosen to be missing.

Her husband will be home by evening. Or at least, the version of him who belongs to this world—if this is still the world she thinks it is. She tries to picture the moment he walks through the door. Will he notice her bare finger immediately, the way she noticed it herself? Or will he kiss her cheek, ask about her day, and never glance at her hand at all?

The second possibility unsettles her more.

If he doesn’t notice, what does that mean? That the ring mattered only to her? That in this universe—if it is another universe—he never gave her one? Or that he is simply living in a different emotional orbit, one where the absence of a gold band is no more remarkable than a missing sock?

She sits on the edge of the bed now, hands folded in her lap, staring at the faint indentation on her finger. It looks like a ghost of the life she remembers.

She considers calling him. But what would she say? Have you seen my wedding ring? feels too small for the enormity of the feeling. Are we still married? feels too large, too fragile to speak aloud.

Instead she whispers to the empty room, “What happened to you?”—though she isn’t sure whether she means the ring, her husband, or herself.

The house is quiet. The kind of quiet that makes her wonder whether something fundamental has shifted, whether she’s standing in the same life she went to sleep in, or whether she’s woken up one inch to the left of it.