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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/WarFrequent on 2024-11-06 07:30:00+00:00.

Ever since her husband died, my grandma has had a string of lovers. They all have old timey names (Gerald, Basil), and dress similarly (Shirt, Jumper, Chinos), so for us they all merge into one.

This said, she often gets a little over attached. She keeps trinkets from her boyfriends about her house. A bracelet one of them bought her. A plastic rose placed in an old wine bottle from a weekend vacation. Even a toothbrush one left after staying over. 

We beg her to throw these items out, but she likes to have them as comforts. She says it like all her lovers are still with her. 

It is always the men who do the dumping. Most have had a life of commitment and want now, in their old age, to try promiscuity. But every dumping wrecks my grandma. She won’t leave the house for days and declines our calls. If we visit her house on the day of the dumping, we find she’s often still in her nightie, with her hair distraught and tear streaks upon her face.

Despite this, we always look forward to the dumping because it means Grandma will make her special Shepherd’s pie. She has a talent, our Grandma, for Shepherd’s pie. She could package it up as some sort of ready meal and would be a millionaire within a week. 

When she announces that she will be making her special Shepherd’s pie, we usually buy a fancy bottle of wine and head over there after work with our daughters. We light candles. It is a happy, special occasion. She always makes too much food, so we leave with tubs of the stuff and eat it reheated throughout the week.

She says the shepherd’s pie has become a bit of a ritual for her now. Like she is finally saying goodbye to the lover and can move on with her life. She is certainly much happier after her shepherd’s pie night. But soon enough we know she will have a new boyfriend.

Her most recent boyfriend - Albert - was a little stranger than the rest. 

For one, he loved rings. He had rings on every finger, sometimes two or three. He had a story for all of them. One he had found while cleaning a sewage works in London. Another he had acquired from an old priest who told him the ring was stolen from Byzantium and possessed evil spirits. My daughters loved these stories and always asked him to tell them again. He bought my grandma several rings, all of them beautiful, and for a month or so, she wore at least one everywhere.

This is not the strange part though. The strange part was that he never wished to enter Grandma’s house. We only ever met him at pubs or restaurants and if he was over at Grandma’s house, he would only ever sit in the garden. When Grandma cooked dinner, she opened the kitchen window and they conversed through it. If he ever needed the toilet, he would go back to his own house (he lived close) and do his business there.

We never quite understood why he did this. He said he wanted to take it slow, but this behaviour went on for almost a month. We encountered him one time at the supermarket, where he was buying potatoes and cheese. We recognised the cheese, so we thought that she would be making her signature shepherd’s pie. We told him he was in for a treat. But he told us he had never heard of that shepherd’s pie. 

The next day - literally the very next day - they broke up. We received the regular phone call, my grandma in tears, and we cancelled the restaurant we had booked for Sunday dinner. It took around a week for her to arrange a shepherd’s pie evening, but sure enough, she rang us on a Thursday and we set off Friday evening with a bottle of wine and our daughters. 

Everybody was in a good mood. We all did the middle finger salute to Albert’s house, and ate heaps of shepherd’s pie. Nothing really of note happened here. We finished our meal - it was delicious, as always - and grandma gave us a Tupperware of leftovers to take home. 

On the drive home, one of my daughters was giggling in the backseat. What is it, we asked, and she showed us a small signet ring. One of Albert’s. Knowing how much grandma treasures the little trinkets from our lovers, we were naturally horrified. We hated the idea that our daughter had snuck into grandma’s rooms and pinched one of these rings. But then she told us, through giggles, that she had found the ring in the shepherd’s pie. This set our other daughter off. Both of them were laughing and shrieking with amusement. Grandma cooked Albert! they chanted. Grandma cooked Albert!

I, of course, know this can’t be the case. Grandma’s old and doddery, and she could very well have accidentally baked a ring into the mince meat while preparing the shepherd’s pie. But I’m uncertain. When my husband reheated the shepherd’s pie tonight, I couldn’t bring myself to eat it. He told me I was being ridiculous, but the thought of eating it makes me feel sick.

But what does everybody else think. Am I being ridiculous? Or should I look into this more?