“I would.”
* * *
Less than ten hours later, Layla left Paris, seemingly the exact same way she’d come.
A late-booked middle seat in the back. A neutral outfit.
All alone.
But somehow, she knew, nothing about her would ever be the same.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Well.
He was fucking miserable.
Tuesdays were almost exclusively miserable now, not that he could really remember Tuesdaysbefore. But Tuesdays now were absolute bullshit for him, sunup to sundown of coming face-to-face with his own limitations. He drove a far way on Tuesdays, which was part of the problem; driving was uncomfortable unless he stopped frequently, which he did now, goddammit, becauseA person cannot expect to change without making changes.
If there was a positive to the stopping frequently, he supposed it was that he’d gotten familiar with a few of the places along the way. A gas station that was clean if he needed to take a leak, a good Dunkin’ drive-through where there was always decaf, never one of thoseOh, we’ll have to make a potsituations. There was even a little shop he’d found one day on the way home when he’d had a particularly bad moment, needing to get out and walk up and down a street in a way that absolutely looked suspicious unless he eventually found a convincing-looking reason to stop in somewhere.
It was a model train shop, which honestly was very fucking annoying at first, really ratcheting things up on the don’t-think-about-Paris pain scale, but in the end, it was still model trains, and he still had his pretend brain, which always enjoyed a 3D model. There was a kid who worked there, a teenager, and Griffin thought that was extremely strange, because in Paris the man in the model train shop had been—well, it didn’t fucking matter, did it? The point was, a teenager named Kevin—sort of an old man name, to be honest—worked in this one, or at least he worked there on Tuesday afternoons. Whatever Griffin thought his own interest in 3D models was, this kid’s was a different order of magnitude. The first time Griffin went in there it took him a full fucking hour to get back out. This despite the fact that Kevin literally called him Scarface, to his actual face. As in, “Hey, I’m going to call you Scarface!” No pause after to see if Griffin would laugh or maybe strangle him to death, just a turn of his avid attention to the next model he wanted to show off.
Anyway, he eventually bought a set to build.
He worked on it on Thursdays, which were objectively better than Tuesdays.
The reason he had to go so far on Tuesdays was for the pain management specialist he’d ghosted all those years ago, when his injuries were fresher and also easier to treat. That guy did not, thankfully, call him Scarface, but at times some garden-variety insults would not have gone amiss, since pretty much every other second of the time they spent in each other’s company was challenging either physically or emotionally, and sometimes both at the same time.
Or, actually, as the specialist would probably say, it was always both at the same time.
One pain feeding the other, which didn’t mean either one was less real.
For a long time on Tuesdays—the first six, at least—the most miserable part had been the reckoning with that in a way he’d avoided doing before. He’d always had good doctors, good therapists, so it wasn’t as though no one had ever told him about the link between his mental health and his neuropathic pain.
But he hadn’t wanted to hear it. He hadn’t wanted topracticeit.
He had always held fast to his pain.
Now, it had been eleven Tuesdays, and he was learning to let it go. He stayed all day, didthe works, which actually meant meditationanda group session with other chronic pain patients, both of which took more collective time than any of the other stuff—water tank, ultrasound therapy, whatever. It hurt, and some days it humiliated him, and on two specific Tuesdays he’d gotten back to his car and fuckingcriedin the front seat, and the worst part of that was how he felt better afterward, and also that his mother could tell when he arrived, two hours later, to her house for dinner.
He always went to dinner at her house on Tuesdays now. Peter usually came, one of his two Mom-allowed nights per week. Before—before the place he still could not think about much in the presence of other people—Griffin had sometimes come to dinner. But he’d never stayed beyond the meal, and now, on Tuesdays, he did, which made it so he and his mother could talk about other things besides what number he was on the pain scale.
These days, sometimes she didn’t even ask at all.
Sometimes she asked about Paris. About the Placketts—about whom she no longer curbed her tongue—and about whether he’d heard anything from Michael.
Usually, he said little.
He saved that for his Fridays for now—individual therapy, here in town. Not too hard to get to, and not near as bad as Tuesdays.
Almostexclusively miserable Tuesdays.
Tonight, he was getting restless for the part of Tuesday that kept it inalmostterritory. He was sitting on the couch with Peter, Mom in her recliner working on a crochet blanket for Leonard, who “did like to be cozy!” Peter was asking Griffin about whether he’d thought any more about school, about Griffin going back to work on that master’s degree he’d never gotten started on because of the fire, and despite himself—despite the way he was thinking about how, at group therapy, one of his cohort had talked about this sort of conversation, the well-meaning people in your life wanting timelines for what you were doing because of their own fears, their own confrontation with the reality that life sometimes didn’t live itself according to anyone’s timelines—he was still weighted with annoyance. Maybe at Peter, and maybe at himself, maybe at his mentor for even suggesting the thing about the master’s program—six Wednesdays ago, that’s when he’d made the suggestion, because Wednesdays were Griffin’s day to work, to actually involve himself more meaningfully in the business that made him enough money for things like all-day pain management therapy.
“No decisions yet, Pete,” Griff said, softening the curtness with the nickname, which Peter genuinely seemed to like, probably because it wasn’t something likeScarface.
Almostexclusively miserable, he thought, taking the last swig of his bottled root beer and standing from the couch.
