Chapter 107: MOTHER'S WARNING
The rings are not just rings.
I understand this the morning after Eleanor leaves, sitting at the kitchen table with the small wooden box open in front of me and Liam's deck running a material analysis on the photograph I took of the engagement ring's stone before I went to sleep. The stone is not a sapphire, which is what it looks like. It is something considerably rarer, a variety found in only two documented locations in the world, both of them connected, according to the geological survey Liam pulls at six in the morning, to mining operations that were shut down in the early nineteen-nineties following legal disputes over intellectual property connected to a research consortium.
The consortium's founding documents, when Liam traces them back through three layers of corporate registration, bear the name of a family I have been hearing about for the last several days.
"Blackwood," I say.
