Griffin set the phone down, put it on speaker. He was moving his fingers across the keys on his computer.
“Are you listening?” Michael said, obviously hearing the tapping sounds.
“I’m getting a fucking flight. A train, I don’t know.”
Michael laughed again. “You’re in a hurry now, after three months?”
“Three and a half. And yeah. I’m in a fucking hurry now.”
He scanned the screen, making sense of the times and numbers before him. On the other end of the phone, he heard the sound of what he thought was a door opening. Michael’s voice again, muffled, like he’d pressed his hand over the speaker.
Then—unmuffled—a delighted laugh Griffin once thought he might not ever get the chance to commit to memory.
Emily’s.
“I told you!” he heard her say. “I told you he was only waiting foryouto call.”
“You catch that?” Michael asked.
This time, Griffin was the one to laugh.
“Yeah,” he said, clicking on one of the options in front of him. “I heard her. And Michael?”
“Yeah?”
“You had better fucking marry that woman someday.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
There was a lot to like about a walk along the Esplanade.
The Charles River Esplanade, that was.
Esplanadewas a French word, or at least it came from French. Middle French, if she was remembering right from looking it up this morning, when she’d agreed to meet Cara here.
She did that a lot these days: look up words. English ones she wanted to know the French for, or French-sounding words she wanted to know the origin of.
She had a new app, a better one that her conversation partner told her about during their first FaceTime meeting, back when Layla was still at her placement in Chico. That had been challenging, what with a nine-hour time difference between there and Paris, but for five weeks they made it work. When Layla got back on Eastern time, the lessons became much easier to schedule.
They also became easier todo.
After five weeks, she’d broken herself of the habit to apologize for every clumsy pronunciation, every botched verb tense, every dropped word or failure to remember the French one. Her conversation partner—a forty-two-year-old woman named Sabine whohad the best shag haircut Layla had ever seen in her life—had helped with that, since she did something like seven French lesson FaceTimes a day and did not have a lot of patience for Layla’s repetitiveI’m sorry!
By the time Layla left Chico, she’d dropped the apologies. She’d even incorporated some French curses for when it all got too frustrating.
She worried, at first, about taking the French lessons. Worried it was way too MacKenzie-adjacent.
But no, she decided.
No, it did not have to be MacKenzie-adjacent. It did not even have to be Griffin-adjacent.
It only had to beLayla-liked-learning-it-adjacent.
And so far, she found that she did.
“These runners,” Cara said, clucking her tongue. Layla thought of the wordcourir, but she did not know the word forrunner.Courier?Probably not, too easy. Next week she would ask Sabine, who would probably make that funnyp-heavy noise of exasperation and say,We sayjogger, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“Like what are they fucking doing?” said Cara. “It’s four o’clock in the afternoon on a Friday! Not working, I guess!”
