"Diane Richardson, what went wrong?" she asked herself, her head pounding from too much prosecco last night, sitting up in bed, picking up the ring box, the gold band glistening in the light from the expensive Murano glass lamp on the side table.
Mark, her self-professed "hot shot" lawyer husband, too busy oiling the wheels of commerce to be there, had clumsily left it on the bedside table when he left early this morning. Diane vaguely recollects early morning seeing him hurriedly get ready for his week-long business trip to Geneva, obviously remembering their anniversary last minute (unlike last year, when he totally forgot). A hastily handwritten post-it note on the box said, "For you, my love", nothing else. "Fuck my life" Diane retorted.
"Really?" Diane muttered, turning the cheap 9 karat gold ring in her palm, a cheap cubic zirconia stone pathetically glinting in the mid-morning light. "Bet his lame assistant, Sebastian, went out during his lunch break to buy this from the Argos catalogue store round the corner from the office" she mused, groggy from her night out with Lisa, her best buddy and all-round nut case. Lisa was last seen stumbling out of the pub at midnight, kissing Diane on the lips, drunk, squeezing her behind, getting into a taxi with Sergio, her step-son, also shit-faced from too many tequila slammers. Both were heading straight to the airport for four days of hedonism in Ibiza, lucky them she thought. At 50, Lisa was a force of nature and Diane missed her already. Did Diane feel something more in her friendship with Lisa, that last exchange outside the pub, was Lisa just being her usual self or was there something more?
Diane by all accounts should have been contented and happy. Sitting in her spacious bedroom, surveying what should have been a middle-class dream, she sighed deeply, dissatisfaction creeping in, a more common occurrence in recent years. Expensive drapes, Italian furniture, marble topped dressers, a walk-in dressing room all came into view, but she felt nothing. Popping a couple of paracetamol into a glass of water on the bedside table for her cracking headache, she slumped back into the pillows.
Lisa had left her a packet of Sobraine Turkish cigarettes in her purse with a lighter, she lit up one, unaccustomed to smoking this early and never at home, especially in their immaculate designer bedroom. Mark abhorred smoking, likening it to a vice of the lower classes. Reflecting on his pomposity she drew deeply on the cigarette and muttered "What a stuck-up idiot", flicking ash into the cheap jewellery box containing her "anniversary" ring.
"Where has it all gone wrong?" she asked herself again. Married to a seemingly loving husband, two lovely kids, both at university, a stable household with no money worries, Mark provided for them very well and she had her own income from investments and some consultancy work she did occasionally. But, she had an emptiness in her life, a lack of passion and excitement.
Until a couple of years ago she'd been convinced that they'd been in a loving, but staid and boring relationship. When she accidently found a receipt in Mark's jacket pocket from a trip to Thaliand, for 50,000 baht, the name "Phuket Ladyboy Titty Bar" emblazoned across the top, she lost all respect for him. Since then she'd seen him for all he was, a drunken bore, middle aged paunch, receding hair and a sense of entitlement.