Layla rubbed her thumb back and forth across his shin. He could only assume it was from the years he’d spent being specially tuned to everything that touched him, but he somehow thought he could feel the bewilderment in that small movement, a confusion that mimicked his own. Why would Michael have said that? And not like a dare, but almost like an invitation? Why did he seem toaccept, after all this time he’d kept it from Emily, that Griffin would be the one to tell her?
“I don’t think he’s himself,” Layla said finally, which is probably the sort of thing he would’ve been insulted by only a few days ago.You don’t know him, he would’ve snarled, monstrous and overprotective, clawing at anything that got in his best friend’s way.
Now, he wasn’t insulted. He wouldn’t quite call himselfcomforted, either, but he was not angry that she’d said it. He thought,Heisn’thimself. He maybe hasn’t been himself since he bought Emily that ring. Since he decided to give her that ring, without telling her the truth.
“Griff,” she said, her fingers pressing more firmly into his calf, hugging him in the only way she could right now. “Listen to me.”
He must’ve shaken his head, given some indication that he couldn’t. Inside him, it was all going wrong now, wires crossing along the left side, creeping strangely and inexplicably into the right.
“Listen,” she said again, more firmly, keeping her hand on him, as though that one point of contact could neutralize every other sensation that was screaming along his nerve endings. “It wasn’t just right for Emily. It was right for Michael, too. You didrightby them.”
Dimly, he thought of another strange irony: that without her, without Layla, he would not have done right. If Layla had not been here, he doubted he would’ve ever known that Michael had not told Emily about Sara Beth. And even if, somehow, hehadknown, he would not have ever breathed a word.
Not if he hadn’t met Layla.
He would not have ever been able to see anything beyond seeing Michael through the wedding.
Itwassomething you said, he thought, no anger, no ire in it now.It was everything you said to me, ever.
With effort, he moved, only enough to get his right hand down to where her left rested on him. He linked their fingers awkwardly,uncomfortably, but no kind of discomfort like this mattered to him now. The two of them, linked forever for having ruined this wedding, not that he’d ever tell her so. Not that it would ever really be anyone’s fault but his.
“We just have to wait,” she said, holding his hand tight, her thumb smoothing over the back of it rhythmically.We just have to waitwas another real doctor-like thing to say. Will the skin graft take, will the antibiotics work, will the tissue soften?We just have to wait. But he didn’t mind. By now, he was almost outside of his mind, parts of him beading with sweat, his body in charge.
“We’ll keep our phones on, and we’ll wait to hear. They need to talk, and we need to wait.”
He wished he could reassure her of that. Thewepart. He wished he could say he’d wait with her, he’d wander with her all night like they’d done yesterday, he’d take out his phone and check it every time she checked hers. He’d kiss her and touch her when the hours got long so she would forget; he would turn her into that tower of light.
But he hadn’t spent the whole night being brutally honest—wrecking ball to someone’s life honest—to start lying again.
Not to her, not now.
So he squeezed her hand and told her the truth.
“I’m probably going to need some help.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
For the second morning in a row, she woke up in Griffin’s bed.
This time, it was not a slow waking, not sleepy and stretching. It was more of a snapping to, her breath catching as soon as her consciousness came online. She sat up quickly with the sense she’d overslept, but when she turned to look out the windows—the curtains undrawn—it was still dark, though after many years of odd hours, Layla knew it was close to dawn. Soon enough, that sky would turn, casting pastels all over Paris, the only place in the world, she thought, where color looked quite like this.
Beside her, Griffin slept.
Heslept.
She could admit, in a dark, selfish corner of her heart, newly discovered to her, that she felt a sense of pride over his slumber—his slack face, his deep breathing, his left hand resting lightly on his abdomen, rising and falling with the movement of his lungs.
I won’t sleep, he’d insisted so many times, during the worst of last night, when it seemed like he would never stop gritting his teeth, when he kept lapsing into short, shallow breaths, when theparts of him that hurt the most seemed to twitch and curl without any intention or purpose.
She hadn’t argued with him about that, of course. He knew himself; he knew his pain. Andsheknew it, too—that people with pain like Griffin understood the tides of it the way no one else ever would. This kind of pain had, she’d thought at one point last night—with no small sense of the irony—its own gravity. To the person experiencing it, it was its own universe.
But even as she expected to stay up with him all night—to walk, if that’s what he wanted, to wrap the leg again, if that would help, whatever—she also started, around midnight, to see signs of him slowing down, mostly in what he was able to say to her. Once, he said, “How do you like it in here?” and she looked up at him, confused and concerned. It would not be good, if he started getting disoriented.
She said, “In your hotel room?”
“In my bell tower,” he answered.
I might not be able to handle this here, she thought.I might need to take him somewhere else.
