Around her the kids are screaming, but Dena can hear something else. The hiss of onions maybe, an angry hiss, like they’re charring

"Happy anniversary,” Dena whispers to herself.

Outside, the day closes quickly on February 15, 2020: an imperceptible city sunset and then a thick night. As if the day never was.

No one had called her. No one remembered. There’s nothing to remember from February 15, 2018.

Slowly, maddeningly calm, feelings held at bay as if they aren’t hers, Dena walks over to a drawer she’s hasn’t opened in one and a half years.

She takes stock of the collection, dissects it coolly with the eye of the amateur jeweler she is. She opens her laptop and creates a chart.

Dena closes the Excel file and scoops the jewelry into her palm. The tennis bracelet, the necklace shaped like a casual heart. Love. What love?

She sticks her finger through the outline of heart. Hollow. Nothing there. But it is beautiful. Shining, aching beauty.

She slips the ring, white fire, onto her finger again. It burns.

The Brechers haven’t asked for it back.

She’d been told they would. Libby, another member of the club, had tried to prep her. It’s thousands of dollars’ worth. Just look at it like they’re recouping their losses.

But they hadn’t.

It wasn’t like they needed to. They were comfortable, balabatish, if not wealthy. They liked to splurge, make a statement, and they had, on their kallah.

And then there was Naftali.

Dena straightens a pillow behind her.

Naftali. Nothing wrong — and nothing quite right.

Her hand reaches for the middle drawer. Fingers find a tool.

She could see him there, smiling vacuously. In her head she follows him as he drifts around the apartment. In the kitchen, eating everything on his plate, never wanting more, never less, never thinking to acknowledge that things took time and effort, to notice that she’d arranged the mashed potatoes in little stacks with flowers of fried onions. In the living room with a sefer, mumbling over a page, the same page whenever she’d checked.

Her fingers are agitated. She looks down. In her lap are two of the chips of the bracelet. Bright in the bedroom light, and very naked without the setting, without the other diamonds.

The flat-nosed pliers are still in her hand, innocuously, as if this were just another project with beads and wire.

She dabbles in jewelry making for fun. Keychains and necklaces that her nieces love. But she’s never tinkered with these — with the real stuff.

What has she done?

Why is she taking apart the tennis bracelet?

Because it’s here. Because they haven’t taken it. Back then, they’d sent a message with a third party to say she could keep it. She is a woman alone in an apartment with gold and silver and — she’s just counted — 49 diamonds.

Naftali the silent. Naftali the strange.

She’d been duped. They’d dazzled their wealth in her face, that gregarious sister talking so loud, she couldn’t wonder about his silence, before they’d jammed that bracelet on her wrist. L’chayim.

Months later, when she could finally hear her voice again, and she couldn’t deny what it was saying, she’d crawled out of the marriage.

On her black skirt, two stars shine, raw.

Happy anniversary, she thinks. Celebrating by taking apart.