Free Sacrifices of Joy by Leslie J. Sherrod

the world a better place, but when he failed you, you made it your mission to show him that you could do it better by taking on a career that is all about service. But he never came back around to see what you accomplished without him. You need to let it and him go. Start your own life, Sienna, with me.”
    â€œHave you lost your mind?” I sounded like my mother, but didn’t care. Every now and then I had to summon that Isabel Davis attitude and tell it like it was. “How dare you? You think that I have wrapped my whole life, career, and reason for being around a man I haven’t seen in nearly two decades? Are you serious?”
    Laz, the journalist who never backed down from a fight, who made a reputation for not holding his tongue with anyone, simply shrugged at me. “If I’m wrong, then tell me why you never took the time to tear the knot with him. Why are you still walking around with his name, even now, three years after finding out he lied to you in every way imaginable? Why did I have to research your divorce options?”
    â€œI kept my name because I wanted my son and I to have the same last name. I wanted Roman to have a sense of continuity, of family, and that is what I chose to offer him. I did not pursue a divorce because it was too emotionally exhausting and I was too busy putting my efforts on what mattered most to me: my son and, yes, my work. Don’t pretend like you know anything about my intentions, my decisions, my sacrifices, or what I have had to go through!” I threw my hands up in the air. “I cannot believe, Lazarus Tyson, that you have the audacity to not ask me what I want, but stand there and tell me what it is you want me to do. This can’t be a proposal. You didn’t ask me anything. You haven’t even offered a ring!”
    â€œI was getting to that.” Laz’s smile returned. He strolled over to a cabinet in the study, pulled open one of its solid wood doors, and took out a familiar bag: the bright yellow bag with the rhinestone and glitter sunburst.
    The bag Skyye had given me back in San Diego.
    Only now her carefully wrapped present, the crocheted purse I’d wanted to give to Roman’s sister, was not inside, I noted, as Laz handed the bag to me. Instead there was a tiny velvet black box with a huge red satin bow tied around it. Laz sat back down in the desk chair, took off the slippers he’d been wearing and put on some shoes. His smile never left as he grabbed his fedora from the desktop where he’d laid it last and began twirling it around his fingers again. “Are you going to open it or not?”
    A sound somewhere between a groan and a sigh escaped from between my lips. “You could go out and get a dinner and do all these wonderful things for me today, but you couldn’t get your own gift bag? What did you do with my joy?” I’d meant to say “joy bag” but I was struggling again to get my words out. I was not trying to have a tantrum, but there were no words to explain the mixture of emotions colliding inside of me.
    The past twenty-four hours had taken their toll.
    â€œOpen the box,” Laz demanded.
    I shook my head no and pulled the ribbon off and lifted the top anyway. A vintage platinum ring was inside, with no stones set in its prongs, no jewels in its empty ridged sides.
    â€œI want you to get the lion’s head ring and disassemble it,” Laz announced, referring to the ring that had been passed from Kisu’s father to RiChard’s bloody hands, that had shown up in a package to me years ago in an urn that was supposed to be filled with RiChard’s ashes but wasn’t, that almost cost Roman his safety and me my sanity—the ring that had been the link that Mbali had found that exposed all of RiChard’s lies.
    â€œWe’re going to take the rubies, sapphires, and diamonds from the lion’s head ring,” Laz continued, “and give those