THE HEIRLOOM

A woman who's superstitious about heirloom engagement rings goes on a quest to discover the brides who previously wore the one she's stuck with.

Shea Anderson is a marketing executive in Los Angeles who works on film festivals. She has four dictums that define her life, the first being that she intends to live in Italy someday and the fourth—and most important, having been handed down from her grandmother—being that she will never accept an heirloom engagement ring. Her grandmother believed that all the karma from whoever wore the ring in the past will come back to haunt you. When her boyfriend, John—who knows her rules—inexplicably proposes with a vintage ring, she is completed floored and filled with anxiety. While she says yes to John, she puts the ring on a necklace chain rather than on her finger, and she soon sets off to discover who had previously worn it. The jeweler who sold the ring to John has a relative, Graham, who's a journalist looking for his next big story, so he joins the search. A trip to New York becomes a trip to Europe, and as Shea, her sister, Annie, and Graham dig deeper they unearth the previous owners of the ring. Shea's parents were divorced, and so were Graham's, and they bond over that experience. Shea distrusts love, as does Graham, and the journey becomes about much more than finding out who previously owned the ring. The story veers between the cloying sweetness of grand gestures and an earnest exploration of the trauma that can follow the children of divorce into adulthood as they try to discover who their parents were as husbands and wives to each other, rather than as mothers and fathers.

A romcom that emphasizes female autonomy and independence.