"Ahhh," Graham sighed quietly in relief as he stepped from the sweltering July heat and into the air-conditioned coolness of the jewelry shop. He heard the electronic bell sound as the door pulled shut behind him. Graham paused a moment to have a look around. There was quite a display in the cozy, dimly lit shop. But that didn't matter. He knew exactly what he wanted.

He stepped up to the counter, where a cheerful young woman stood behind it. Her head was cocked at an acute angle and she had a wide smile across her face.

There was something strangely pleasing about her smile.

"Hello, how may I help you?" the woman asked Graham as he placed his hands on the glass counter.

"I'm looking for an engagement ring," he told her, and her smile widened a bit more.

"Well then you've come to the right place. I'm Simone and I'd like to start off by saying that we at Thomson Jewelers are glad you chose to do business with us," she told Graham with that extraordinary smile.

"Okay, I’m Graham Harvey and I'm glad to do business with you too," he told her, but he wasn't really thinking about it. What he was thinking about was that smile. It was oddly familiar, yet he couldn't quite place it.

"Well that's great," Simone said in an upbeat tone. "So, about this ring…"

As Simone helped Graham pick out a ring, he couldn't help being constantly distracted by that eerie smile. It wasn't eerie in the bad, creepy way. It was more eerie in the sense that he couldn’t remember when or where he had seen it before. It was like déjà vu, but not really. He couldn’t quite explain it.

"Mr. Harvey," Simone's voice came to Graham, calling him back from someplace far away. "Mr. Harvey, are you alright?"

Graham came back to reality like a shuttle coming back to Earth. "Yeah…yeah, I'm fine."

"Good," Simone said as she sighed with relief. "I was beginning to get worried."

"No, no, nothing to worry about. Just daydreaming that's all."

"Alright then. Moving along. You mentioned something earlier about an engraving, did you not?"

Graham looked down at his watch and found he had already spent fifteen minutes here. He needed to be back in his office in 35 minutes, and he needed to go across town to get there. He wished he had more than a fifty-minute lunch-break. He could only spend twenty more minutes here. At the most.

"Yes, I'm looking to get it engraved," Graham finally answered her. "If that's possible."

"It certainly is possible. All you need to do is fill out the proper form," Simone said as she headed towards the back. "Let me get that for you."

As she went into the back for the form he needed, he looked at the ring. He thought of what he wanted to have engraved on the ring. It was the same thing that had been going through his mind all week:

To Natalie Woodrow, Who Will Always Have The Biggest Place In My Heart

And then it hit him. The damn thing had quite literally been staring him in the face for twenty minutes. He knew where he had seen the smile before. It was Natalie's smile. Not her normal smile. The one she only used on occasion. The one she only used on him.

"Got it!" Simone proclaimed as she came back to the counter with the “proper form” as she had called it.

"Thank you," Graham told her as he began filling it out with the pen she had given him.

"You're welcome," Simone answered automatically.

When he was done with the form, Simone thanked him again for doing business with Thomson Jewelers and requested he had a nice day. He said the same to her, and she told him he could pick up his ring on Friday, after it had been engraved.

Graham walked through the door and into the still sweltering heat of summer. He paused on the sidewalk, seeing little traffic, and deciding to jaywalk. He had to make tracks if he was going to get back to work on time.

Graham never saw who was in the car that killed him on impact. And if he had, the shock alone would have done the job itself. And the lovers in the car didn't immediately see the man whom they hit.

For Jacob Erickson, the driver, was looking into the eyes of Natalie Woodrow, the passenger. And Natalie Woodrow, the passenger, was looking into the eyes of Jacob Erickson, the driver. No…she wasn’t really looking. It couldn’t be described as a look. It was more like a smile.

That smile.