"I thought you were going to get rid of that ring!" I hissed, putting down Grandma's suitcase next to Uncle Fred and Nikki's bed. As soon as possible, I had managed to drag Jack to somewhere private by offering to take the suitcase upstairs.
The eyes that looked into mine were green. "I did! I swear I did!"
"You obviously didn't! If you had, it wouldn't be here, but it is!"
"What is?" Adam came out of the bathroom. Jack and I both jumped.
"Adam! You can't just listen to our conversations like that!"
"What were you doing in there?"
"What? I was putting clean towels onto the bathroom, like Nikki told me to! What were you talking about anyway? What ring?"
Jack ripped the silver ring off his finger and threw it onto the floor. Adam picked it up.
"What, this piece of junk? What's so special about it?"
Jack sighed. "I keep throwing it away, but the next day it's back on my finger. I don't know-"
"You clearly didn't throw it away," Adam dropped the ring back onto the carpet.
"But I-"
"Or it wouldn't be here! Maybe you dreamt it or something-"
"Dreamt what?" The door opened to reveal Rosie with a laundry basket in her arms.
"For God's sake!" I cried, exasperated. "Why is everyone listening to our conversation?"
"Jack and Erin think that that broken ring we found is possessed," Adam told Rosie.
"What?" Rosie gave us an odd look.
"Not possessed," explained Jack, looking frustrated. "It's just that when I try and get rid of it-"
"You can't have tried!" I said firmly. "It can't have come back by itself, that's impossible!"
"I know, but I definitely got rid of it!" Jack glared at us. "I know I did! I'm not going insane!"
I swallowed. Jack looked right into my eyes as he said it. I remember him telling me yesterday that he'd thrown the ring in the bin.
"Destroy it," I said at last. "Right here, right now."
"Stay there." Adam left the room suddenly. The rest of us exchanged mystified looks. He strode back into the room a few minutes later with a large hammer. He knelt down in front of the ring and raised the hammer high, before slamming it down onto the ring. There was a cracking sound as the blue stone shattered. The hammer hit it over and over, and the silver ring was crushed before our eyes. By the time Adam was satisfied, all that remained were tiny, jagged blue shards of crystal and fragments of dented metal.
In silence, Adam picked up every bit of the smashed ring, went over to  the window, threw it open and flung the pieces into the sky. They separated and fell, the small fragments of metal and glass raining down like snowflakes.
"Can we forget about it now?" Adam slammed the window closed.
I nodded. If there was one thing we could be sure of, it was that we would never see that silver ring again.
When snowflakes fall, they are difficult to see when they touch the ground, hidden in long blades of grass, or between the cracks of stones, or they drift on top of more snow and are indistinguishable from the billions of others. And then they melt.
I hoped that the ring would melt from our memories too.