“OK,” I manage, my heart collapsing in on itself. “But... I do want to see you again. Both of you. If you want to.”
Reid’s eyes find mine again, and I notice the barest flicker of something in them—wistfulness, maybe, or at least the possibility of it.
“Do you?” Reid’s tone is even, like there is no wrong answer. “I need you to be honest with me here. Not careful, not protective—just honest.”
I realize how unfamiliar this is. With James, I was never punished for obfuscation and rewarded for honesty. I wasjust... left alone. Now Reid’s challenge hangs in the air, waiting for me to take it and run—or to back down from it.
“I want to see you again,” I say. The words feel insufficient. But they’re real.
Reid studies my face for a long moment, and I can see him taking in my statement, weighing whether it’s enough to surmount what just happened here. Before he has a chance to respond, Emme and Gracie come bustling back into the kitchen, their laughter breaking up the tension that just hung between us.
We all move toward the foyer, and Emme gives Gracie a hug goodbye, then surprises me by offering one to Reid too.
Then Reid turns to me, hesitating, and the pause that follows splits the air like a current. In that pause, I imagine that his arms might circle me, his mouth might find mine, and all his hurt might be erased, and so might mine. And in that fantasy, I’d be done for, absolutely done for; my bones turned to stardust, gathering in that perfect spot between his neck and his collarbone, where his skin smells like yesterday and tomorrow.
But Reid doesn’t do that. He can’t. Instead, he grazes a hand down my arm, too quickly for the girls to conceive of it as anything of consequence. He says something about tomorrow, tossed like a promise he wishes he could keep, but the truth is that I don’t know if I’ll see him again. I refuse to feel guilty about that—for prioritizing self-preservation, and for keeping Emme safe—but I can’t ignore the sadness that shrouds me as I close the door behind them.
XIV
I wake up early the next morning and spend the next four hours in the kind of fugue state that only focused work can offer. I was supposed to deliver photos from the tribute show yesterday, so now I’m in overdrive, uploading, sorting, and editing. With the images blown up on my desktop, each face in the crowd is magnified, every grain and highlight thrown into clearer relief. I can’t help but look for Reid. I don’t find him anywhere.
I’m done by ten, around when Emme ambles down to the kitchen in a worn-out Pixies T-shirt that drops down to her knees, a hand-me-down from her dad.
I glance at the oven clock.Reid and Gracie should be getting to the Met, I think.
The way we left things last night, I know that I need to be the one to reach out to him. It wasmytemper—my fear—that flared in an act of... I’m not sure what. Last night I would have said I was safeguarding something sacred, but why do I feel singed? And why do I keep staring at my phone dumbly, as if a text from Reid will materialize out of thin air? Why am I so scared to act on what I want, now that it’s within reach?
I leave my phone on the kitchen table and put on a pot of water for tea. I won’t let Emme have coffee yet, but she likes the ritual of drinking something hot in the morning.
Emme opens the French doors leading out to the garden, then settles into the stool across from me. I slide over her cup, heavy with honey. Distantly, I hear the telescopic whine of a siren, the staccato sparkle of birdsong.
She takes a sip. “I talked to Dad this morning. He called me.”
I raise my eyebrows. It’s probably not fair of me to be surprised that James actually stuck to our plan, but I can’t help myself.
“Oh yeah?”
“He apologized for not being able to take me to the show. One of the other attendings fell off his motorcycle and is out of commission for a few weeks, so he has to cover for him. He understands that this is a profoundly unfair reason, but apparently the entire hospital system would crumble without him there.” She rolls her eyes into her tea. “You know, he’s kind of an asshole. Not to me, exactly, but like... in general.”
Which makes me feel like I’ve been stabbed in the gut with a thousand tiny needles. But this is what I wanted, isn’t it? For Emme to finally have a clear-eyed understanding of her father?
“Your dad’s not perfect—none of us are—but he’s not a bad person,” I say. I think it might be true.
“I’m starting to get why he was hard to be married to.”
I pause, trying to craft a diplomatic response.
“I knew your dad had to put his whole self into his patients to be the best surgeon he could. That’s what I signed up for when I married him—it’s something I admired about him. But you’re right, it wasn’t easy to be chosen second. It did make me feel lonely.”
But you know this, I think. My heart wrings inside my chest.He does the same thing to you.
She stirs her tea bag around in her smiley-face mug. “Do you think Reid would be easy to be married to?”
I let out a shocked laugh. This girl has never not kept me on my toes. “I’m not sure,” I say, acting like I’ve never considered it.
“Gracie wants him to get married again, because she’s worried about what’ll happen to him when she goes to college. She thinks he uses her and his work as a way to escape, and when she’s gone, he’ll only have that one thing, which is unwise, considering how erratic his business is. Grace says even an Oscar isn’t enough to guarantee your long-term success. And what would he be left with if his work fails?”
I have to actively work to keep my eyes from going wide. This is a lot of information to take in, and my daughter is not the right person to process it with. I try to sidestep the Reid of it all. “Have you ever thought about that? Me or Dad eventually being with someone else?”
