To tell Griffin.
“He’d always said the same,” she told him. “Since we first met in college, he’d said the same. What we wanted out of life—our work, our hopes for traveling, the way we felt about the future, the lifestyle we wanted—we didn’t want to bring kids into that. We felt the same.”
She told him, too, that she never took it for granted. That she had always felt this pressure, thisobligation, to make sure he was truly certain. It must have been hundreds of times, she asked him. When they were dating, on the day they got engaged. All the way up to the wedding.
And Jamie had always reassured her.
He was certain, too.
But then he wasn’t so certain anymore.
It started slow, but not so slow that it hadn’t made her feel dread right from the start.
A birthday party for one of her attendings, where Layla had helped out a fellow resident for maybe a grand total of half a minute by holding their three-month-old, and how Jamie had said, on the way home, that it “surprised” him to see it. To feel “some kind of way” about it.
A holiday card sent by a friend from college, a collage of photos featuring a three- and five-year-old, and Jamie’s wistful,Theyarecute, aren’t they?
Then, more serious moments.Sometimes I do think about it. Lately, I wonder what a kid of ours would be like. Don’t you think we could make it work? Don’t you think for us, it’d be different? What if we agreed to a timeline for revisiting it? What about when you’ve had five years as an attending?
Eventually, it became crushing: a vise around her middle, tightening and tightening as it was increasingly clear that Jamie had become certain about something else. Counseling, which she agreed to, even though it was evident from the start that Jamie saw it as counseling forher, that Jamie had somehow become one of those people who thought Layla’s decision must have a deeper seed, a motherless child who could not imagine herself as a mother. Special “date nights” that felt weighted with expectation, never more than when Jamie once said,What if we leave it in the hands of the universe?and she’d thought,We’re the universe, remember? We make our own gravity.
But instead, she’d said,I’m not taking out my fucking IUD, Jamie, and it had been that—that moment of pure, undiluted frustration, so rare from her—that had seemed to spell the end of it.
So, finally, it was softer, quieter conversations. Tearful ones, brokenhearted ones, heavy with their long history together, all the ways their lives were intertwined. Jamie would sometimes say,Itdoesn’t matter; I’ll get over it; I love you and I love our life, but Layla knew he was lying to himself.
She knew that part of him was waiting—would always be waiting, until it was too late—for her to say that she’d changed her mind.
“But I won’t,” she said now to Griffin, who sat across from her almost perfectly still, a statue, a shade from the underworld readying himself to throw open the gates, to shove a new sinner through the fiery doors.
She knew that she was not that sinner, and it felt sogood.
“Remember yesterday?” she said, watching as the hellfire in his eyes immediately banked, transforming into something else—warm with memory. “When I said what it had been like for me to come to Paris the first time?”
He nodded. At some point, he’d taken off his hat, tucking it behind him on the chair to make room for the food they’d eventually ordered. A few minutes ago, a new pair of people had taken seats at the table beside them, and Layla had noticed—in her periphery—the way one of the men stared openly at Griffin’s profile.
She wanted to hiss at him. Like a little hell-creature.
But Griffin hadn’t seemed to notice at all.
“You said you were trying to become someone,” he said.
She nodded, too, pressing her lips together as though it would keep her from speaking this complicated thought too soon. It’d been living inside her for a long, long time. Since that first moment, that firstIt made me feel some kind of way, seeing you hold a baby. It’d gathered speed and mass, like a rock rolling down a muddy hill, picking up dirt and moss and whatever else, faster and faster the heavier it became. Every sly, and then direct, comment, every counseling session. Every conversation about ending it.
“Ididbecome someone,” she finally said. “For him, I did. WhenI met him, I was so in love with him—with who he was, and also…how he’d become who he was. His traditions, his favorite things, his family who loved him so much, and I didn’t have many of those on my own. I wanted so badly to have them, but I…I didn’t have many people toshowme when I was young.”
Griffin did something then—something she knew mattered, when it came to him.
He reached across the table, not pausing, not calculating, not worrying, and touched her. His right hand on her left wrist, curling his warm, strong fingers around her. He didn’t say anything at all.
“But I did have some things of my own, and this was one of them. This knowledge of myself, of what I didn’t want for my life, and never had wanted, the same way other people know that theydowant it. And I look back and think—this was my one thing. Myonething I brought to that marriage that I couldn’t—that I wouldn’t let become something else. I wouldn’t do it to myself, and I certainly wouldn’t do it to a kid.”
He was stroking that soft, vulnerable skin on the inside of her wrist now, and it felt perfect. Comforting and courage-giving, so she could say this thing she’d never felt ready to say to anyone.
“And for all Jamie ever said to me about us being family, it feels funny. It feels funny that it only took one thing for us not to be one anymore.”
There, she thought, triumph moving through her—like one of those great, gold-winged horses they’d passed on the Pont Alexandre yesterday, rearing up in what looked to her like celebration.There, I finally said it.
Wearen’tfamily anymore.
