“Your ex-husband,” Griffin said, and the ghost of that quirk was gone. The bleakness back.
“He’s fine,” she blurted, thinking of that funny little wheeze, that still-shocked look on his face as she’d turned to leave.
“I figured,” Griffin said. “I didn’t hit him that hard, despite his carrying on.”
“You didn’t have to, you know. Hit him. It doesn’t bother me, that she’s pregnant.”
He shrugged, looked toward the curve of the street, his gaze distant. She wondered if he even realized that he had the left side of his face facing her. He hardly ever did that, before.
“I figured that, too. I lost my head for a second.”
It was so quiet, so preternaturally quiet. As though all of Paris had slept in. Or as though all of its residents were sitting inside and waiting for whatever was next, the same way Layla was, even as she stood outside, so exposed.
“Your ex-husband,” he said again, and she almost rolled her eyes. She almost said,How many ways do I have to tell you? I am not worried about him, but then he looked back at her, and she realizedthat, when he’d said this before, he hadn’t really been asking for a status report on the man’s face.
It’d only been the beginning of a sentence. The beginning of something bleaker.
“He said something to me yesterday.”
“Griffin, he doesn’t—”
“He said you deserve someone good. Someone reliable.”
She swallowed. Dread and frustration and anger gathering within her anew. If she’d stayed behind to shut the door on Jamie, only to have Griffin open it again, she thought she might scream.
“Ihopeyou are not about to tell me what Ideserve,” she said. “I hope you do not think I’m incapable of determining that formyself. Not after everything I’ve told you about how I got here. How I knew what Ididn’twant for my life.”
Something flickered in his expression, chasing away the bleakness for a split second, buoying her with a too-transitory hope.
He shoved his hands deeper in his pockets, shook his head. “I’m not about to tell you that,” he said. “I think you do deserve those things. But your choices are yours.”
They are, she thought mulishly.And I’d choose you, if you’d let me.
But he wouldn’t. She knew he wouldn’t.
“There’s something that guy and I have in common,” he said, and she had to admire how he still, even after punching him in the actual face, would not say Jamie’s name out loud. “Beyond having ideas about what you deserve.”
She didn’t answer. She was too stymied, her brain searching fruitlessly for comparisons between Jamie and Griffin.
She could not think of a single one.
“I don’t think either of us are good. I don’t think either of us are reliable.”
“That isn’t tr—”
“But here’s the difference between me and him, Layla. Iknowit. I know I’ve got a half dozen problems I’ve never bothered to deal with, because all I’ve been doing is worrying about how bad I hurt. And I know I can’t be counted on to fix them. I know that next week I could have a bad day, ten times worse than what you saw last night, and all I’d do is start thinking again about whether I could somehow get the gates of hell to open up for good this time. To keep me in and never let me out again, until I got so used to it that it would feel like the only forever I’d ever get. Iknowit.”
Something inside her shook to hear that:get the gates of hell to open up for good this time.She knew what he was saying without him having to say it so plainly. That the worst of his pain had included thoughts like this, however passing, and she knew that wasn’t good, though she supposed she meant the word differently than he did, or differently than Jamie did, with hissomeone goodbullshit.
She meant that it was notokayfor Griff to feel that way.
But she didn’t have time to explain that, because Griff was in it now, and if there was any hope to be found in this path they were on, it was that he didn’t look quite so bleak anymore. He looked more like the man she’d first seen on the plane—taut and determined—mixed with the man who’d once dragged her down the Boulevard Saint-Germain to kiss her.
“That guy you were married to—it wasn’t good, what he did to you. The position he put you in, the way he saidfamilyand meant something other than what he promised you the day you got married. That wasn’t fucking reliable, making those vows to you and deciding that changing his mind was enough of a reason to stop honoring them. And I won’t do that to you. Iwon’t.”
That last part, he said as though he was convincing himself,and she thought, at first, that maybe what he was looking for was for her to help—forherto step in and do the convincing.
And she almost did. She almost opened her mouth and said,Of course you won’t.She almostsoothedhim, made herself a sort of sacrifice to him. Not in the same way she had with Jamie—not saying,Of course we can stay friendsorOf course there’s nothing to forgive.
