Not like, French-person French. But still.French.
“Je prends un déca, s’il vous plaît,” he said carefully, the blade dulled with his effort.
“Bien sûr,” the server replied, not looking at Layla as she turned and left them alone again.
“You speak French,” Layla blurted.
“Not really,” he said. Then he added, sharp again: “I practiced before I came.”
Each word an indictment: as though practicing the language of the country she would be visiting was the veryleastshe could do. She thought of her still-unused itinerary, her already-fallen-apart outfit plan. She thought of clutching her phone in her hand on that plane, typing in her silly affirmations.
She could not even remember how to sayI am thriving.
Whyhadn’tshe practiced French before she came? She could’ve used one of those apps, like she’d done before her first trip here, little badges she would show off to Jamie. She could’ve taken time after work, or in between cases, or—
A clear memory from last night finally bubbled to the surface, and in her frazzled, defensive state, it didn’t matter to Layla that it wasn’t the one she needed most at this moment.
“Some of us have to work,” she snapped back.
Passive-income Griffin,all-day-long-to-practice-his-French Griffin.
Gross.
Oh, he didn’t like that, she could tell. His jaw ticked, his teeth clenching behind the tight, flat set of his lips.
But he would not be distracted. “You don’t know, do you?”
She swallowed, twisted the clasp of her hands back and forth in her lap.
“You don’t know what you said,” he added.
“I didn’t say anything,” she finally answered, overloud, which immediately betrayed her lack of confidence in this answer.
She pressed her lips together long enough to take a breath through her nose, then tried again, keeping her voice down this time.
“Emily was fine when I left her last night.”
This, at least, was the truth. Emily had walked through the hotel’s hallways with her arm looped through Layla’s, her cheeks pink and her smile huge and natural. She’d joked that Rosie and Layla were Chaos and Order, two poles that would keep her centered this week.
“She was laughing and excited. We didn’t talk about anything unusual. We…caught up.”
“Did you talk about your divorce?” Griffin said, a sneak attack. Plunging that blade right into the heart of her.
“Absolutely not,” she bit out.
“Right, why would you,” he said, his eyes doing a slow circuit of her face, checking for cracks. “It wasamicable.”
In that moment, Layla hated him.
Hatedhim.
It was such a shocking, uncomfortable feeling for her—hot and unbounded and all-consuming—that she shifted in her chair. The truth was, she was not sure if she’d ever really hated someone: hatred, she had always thought, was another one of those mind-under-matter collapses in the human experience, a failure of reason at best and a failure of empathy at worst. In the hospital—inwhateverhospital Layla was in, no matter whether she’d been workingthere for a day or for weeks—people could tell this about her instinctively. They sent her into rooms with the most belligerent patients, or worse, the most angry loved ones of patients, and she’d come out largely unbothered, offering some soft justification for their behavior.
They’re scared; they’re hurting; they’re hungry; they’re sad.
But she couldn’t, at this moment, think of any justification for Griffin Testa staring at her like this.Speakingto her like this. Sayingamicableto her as if it was something to sneer at.
“Listen,” she said, barely recognizing her own voice, “I don’t remember saying anything that caused any particular reaction in Emily. Certainly nothing about her wedding, or her relationship. I told you she seemed fine last night, and I was telling you the truth. Maybe you misunderstood something Michael said. Or maybe he was confused.”
