"Come on, Kim," Eric said with a sigh, leaving the ring on his finger and turning to head back towards his bike. "You broke up with me, remember?" As Eric spoke, he felt a strange tingle on his left hand and glanced down at the ring. Odd; he hadn't meant to keep it. What if someone came looking for it?
"Don't be ridiculous," Kim said with a laugh. "I could never break up with you. You're the one who said that long distance wouldn't work." Eric rolled his eyes. Kim was always trying to flip things around to make it look like she was the victim - one of the things he had noticed only in hindsight after they broke up. "Do you remember..." Kim continued, her voice growing gentle. "Do you remember when we talked about what might have been?"
This was one of the other major red flags Eric had noticed after they broke up. Shortly after he had gone off to college, after he had already met and started dating Amy, Kim had begun contacting him regularly. At first it seemed innocent enough, but it got worse the more she talked about how she wished they had stayed together, how she wished they had done more. She even said she wished that she could have had a baby with him so he would stay - again, acting as if she wasn't the one who had started the break up. Now, of course, Eric knew to shut down that kind of talk right away.
"Kim," Eric said patiently, "we never had sex, and you never got pregnant. That was just a daydream of yours." Eric rubbed his thumb across that bronze ring, which for some reason he was still wearing and which seemed to be tingling again. To his surprise, Kim laughed.
"You're so silly, Eric," she said. "Like either of us could forget that night your parents missed their flight and we had the house to ourselves."
Eric froze, staring at nothing. Though he had always tried to make the right choices, there was one time things had gotten really close. A snowstorm had canceled the last flight back from New York, where his parents had been enjoying an anniversary trip, and he had taken the opportunity to have Kim over to watch a movie. She had ended up falling asleep, but Eric knew if she hadn't, he might have...but it hadn't happened, and at any rate he had never told her how close it had come. So how could she know?
"And look," Kim continued, "I know you didn't have to carry him around for nine months, but don't pretend you haven't noticed all the pictures I've sent you the last three years."
"What...?" Eric was confused. Kim was talking as if she actually believed she and Eric had had a baby together. It wasn't her usual manipulations - this sounded completely insane. He opened his mouth to tell her she should get help, but then he hesitated. Something seemed off about all this. Slowly, he pulled his phone away from his ear and opened up his texts. There was Kim's number near the top, but in addition to the "Hey, how are you?" messages she had been sending him, there was a series of photo after photo - all of a toddler that clearly had a mix of features from Kim and himself.
"Oh, I get it," he heard Kim said. "Amy's there, isn't she? You don't want her overhearing this. I get it."
"What?" Eric said again. "No, Amy's not here." But at that moment, he caught sight of Amy walking down the sidewalk towards him....which should have been impossible, because she was home visiting her family for the weekend.
"Hey, Eric," Amy said with a smile. "Fancy meeting you out here. Got done studying already?" Then she noticed his phone. "Oh, sorry, didn't realize you were on the phone."
"Okay, I have _no_ idea what's going on," Eric said, looking around. "Is this some sort of prank, or..." He trailed off as the ring gave another tingle, and this time he knew it _was_ tingling because he suddenly understood exactly what it was doing. Every time he said a sentence while wearing it, reality would change so that the opposite was true - and only by wearing it on his left hand had he kept himself from being unaware of the changes.