Margaret took the ring and slid it onto her thumb, because her finger had grown too thin. Her eyes filled. She told me she had lost it on their honeymoon, swimming off the beach by the lighthouse, and she had spent two days crying and searching the sand. Jack had held her and promised to find it. Every autumn after that, they had returned to Hatteras, and Jack had walked the tideline at dawn with a borrowed metal detector, always coming back with something that was not the ring.

She told me he had stopped coming a few years ago when his hip gave out, and she had assumed he had finally given up. Then she asked me to open the tin box. Inside, wrapped in a faded handkerchief, was a second ring, exactly like the first, and a letter in Jack’s handwriting. She read it aloud in a trembling voice, and I had to look at the window.

The letter said that Jack had found the original ring on the third day of their honeymoon, under the lifeguard tower. He had wanted to hand it back at once. But Margaret had cried so tenderly, and said she would marry him again just to feel it, that he had decided to bury the ring and buy a replacement. Every year after that, he had gone back to the spot and said a small prayer over the sand. He wrote that he had always meant to tell her. The last line made her laugh through her tears. “I am sorry for the hoax, my love, but I have loved you twice as long.”

Margaret wears both rings now, one on each hand, and she tells everyone the story. I visit her every month with a thermos of cocoa. The next October, with her niece pushing her wheelchair, we all went to Hatteras and stood at the old lifeguard tower. She scattered a handful of sand across the water, and the gulls scolded us, and the tide came in slowly, the way it always does.