I glared into my scotch. “Michel hired them.”
“Oh.”He paused, staring at the minty orange drink in his glass. “That explains a lot. You were seriouslyaloneout thereall night?With your secret girlfriend?”
“Lexi flew here on the spur of the moment when I told her to come. We’ve been meeting clandestinely for over a year. Every time I travel, I send her a plane ticket and ditch my team in the evening.”
John shook his head and sipped his drink, and he winced. Yeah, that much sugar probably made his teeth ache.
“We’d been talking rings and strollers for a while,” I continued. “Last night, seeing you in finalpreparations to marry Anna got into my head. It wasn’t jealousy, precisely, though it’s amusing to think of it that way.”
John nodded over his drink, listening.
Good.“It was more like your preparation to truly take the leap gave me permission. No one in our friend group from Le Rosey has married. Have you noticed that?”
John’s nods sped up. “It gave one pause.”
“We probably need therapy.”
John snorted into his drink. “You think? But the administration forced you into counseling after—afterward.”
No one liked to say it out loud. “We wereallabandoned by our parents on Le Rosey’s doorstep when we were kindergarteners or thereabouts. Wealltomcatted around the dorms, busting a nut as a surrogate for feeling loved. Yet everyone thinks they don’t have intimacy issues. We’re all emotionally mutilated, John. We never stood a chance.”
John glared at his sugared cocktail. “I guess.”
“And then I found Lexi in a museum in Verona, someone who’d grown up in a family, who has an open heart and loves like her whole soul is bulletproof. Is it any wonder that I didn’t want you damaged nitwits turning her into a zombie, too?”
John’s eyebrows flinched like he’d been shot between the eyes, and I closed my eyes to scrub that image from my mind before it began circling.
“Yeah, okay,” he said, again scrying for answers in the orange depths of his mojito.
“Las Vegas is where anything can happen on a roll of the dice, and the city inspired me to ask her to elope. No, Ibeggedher to marry me last night. It wasn’t a lark, John. It was a desperate grappling tohavesomeone.”
Fashioning my lie felt a little too much like pulling strands out of my heart, stringing them on a harp, and playing a song on my still-quivering nerves.
“She said yes, even though I was paralytic.” I kept talking. “She wanted to wait until I sobered up. I insisted on getting the license. I insisted on finding a Russian Orthodox church. Did you know I rousted that poor old priest out of his bed to conduct the ceremony?”
“It seemed like he could’ve used a cup of coffee on the video,” John muttered.
“And that video,” I scoffed. “Some people go public with a post on Instagram, but I hard-launched our relationship with a livestream of the holy sacrament of matrimony.”
John’s pinched brows widened as his slow chuckle wound up. “You sure did.”
“And you must admit, it is perfectly in character for me to marry her as thoroughly as possible, forcing a priest to baptize and chrismate her before the matrimonial rite. All the t’s crossed, and all the i’s, dotted. Scrupulous attention to detail. On time and complete.”
John tilted his head, nodding, agreeing that such precision was indeed in character for me.
And then he fucking asked, “What do you think Hannelore is going to say?”
I couldn’t keep from rolling my eyes. “Hannelore broke up withmeand has been married to someone else for over a year. Her opinion of my relationship status does not concern me.”
John didn’t even look up at me. “You sure?”
“Her opinion of my relationship status didn’t overly concern me when we were together,” I admitted.
Now John leaned back and stared at me. “Damn.”
I shrugged. “I never cheated on her. I just never felt the connection with her that I should have. Every day was just another day. She scheduled herself with my admin for dates, and I did the same with hers. I just went on and on, feeling nothing, just numbness and an unexpressed resentment thatI’d rather be in my flat in Paris reading a book than taking in a fashionable art exhibit or being seen at the right parties. I thought I must not be able to feel emotional connections,anyemotional connections, that it must have been me.”
That statement dropped off my lips like I’d said it a thousand times. It had certainly echoed in my head more than that.
