“He was notconfused.” He said the word with the same sneer in his voice as he did withamicable. As if it were completely impossible for Michael to ever be confused about anything.
She lifted her hands, palms up, in a sort ofWell?gesture. “Then maybeyoumisunderstood.”
In the face of his disdain, this version of events started to take hold in her, to make more sense than any of Layla’s fizzy panic. This hatred was clarifying, better than whatever coffee the server would bring out. Layla had been buzzed last night, but not drunk. More than that, she knew she’d never really stopped being attentive to her own performance in front of Emily and Rosie. She knew she played her role, supportive-still-sort-of-sister-in-law.
And she would’ve known if something was wrong with Emily.
But Griffin? Griffin was the kind of man who stood in the aisle of a transatlantic flight and shut everyone up with a wild look in his eyes. He sweated in elevators, pressed buttons like they offended him, strode out into the Paris night as if he had a hound from hell biting at his heels.
Another clarifying thought, one that Layla didn’t enjoy even a little: Maybe the hound wasn’t metaphorical. Maybe Griffin had been going out onto the streets of Paris to find something chemical, something illegal—
A clink of dishes interrupted the grim thought, the server back with coffee. Layla blinked down at her tiny cup, the liquid inside darker and heavier than the watered-down drip she was used to in the States. On her honeymoon, French coffee—espresso, really—had been a revelation to her, its compact package a delicate contrast to the punch it packed. At sidewalk café tables with Jamie, she had studied other patrons and their small, pursed-lip sips, the way they made that tiny cup last for as long as they wanted to linger. She had imitated them so carefully, feeling grown-up and sophisticated andmarried.
Now, she had an embarrassingly American pang for a to-go cup.
She could feel Griffin watching her, waiting until the server left again.
“I did not misunderstand,” he said, when she was gone.
As though he’d never experienced a fizzy brain-bubble in his life.
“Michael woke me up at four o’clock this morning,” he continued dispassionately, methodically, as if he was proving to her a sobriety she hadn’t dared question out loud. “Emily came to his hotel room at midnight, a half hour after you, apparently, got back from dinner. She explained to him that having you here was…”
He paused, obviously considering his words before going on.
“Very important to her,” he finished, and Layla decided that he hadn’t really been considering his words. He’d been gearinghimself up to say something that he so clearly found unbelievable, like it was impossible for him to imagine Layla—aren’t you the ex?—being important to anyone.
She faked a pursed-lip sip, letting the espresso touch her lips but not taking any in. She just wanted an excuse to lower her eyes.
“She told him that you and she talked a lot at dinner, and that it got Emily to thinking about this week. She told him this”—he lifted an arm, cut his hand through the courtyard air quickly before lowering it again—“planninghad taken up so much of her energy that she’d barely thought about their marriage.”
“I saidnothingabout marriage.Nothing.”
There was a frantic note in her voice, and she wished desperately that she could call it back, because she worried it made her sound unsure, when this was the part of the conversation she should be most sure about. Once the papers were signed, she avoided the topic—marriage in general, and hers in specific—with surgical precision, and had tried to train everyone she spoke to regularly in her life to do the same. Sure, Cara still might askHow are you,really?with a furrowed brow, or text things likeHave you seen him yet!but for everyone else, Layla had made it vague, indistinct. A universe scattered across multiple dimensions. Too big to contemplate.
“Nevertheless,” was all Griffin said in reply.
Nevertheless, it was you.
His eyes, so relentlesslyonher, were the same rich brown-black as her espresso. She replayed everything he’d said so far—that having Layla here was important to Emily, that they’d talked a lot at dinner, that it got Emily tothinking—and had a horrible, heartrending thought.
What if it hadn’t been something she said at all?
What if it was merely the fact that she’d come here in the first place?
What if, despite Emily’s very best hopes and intentions in inviting her here, all Layla could ever be was a reminder of the way marriages—even the ones where two people really loved each other—could fail?
She pushed the tiny cup and saucer toward the middle of the table. She had no appetite for its jolting lucidity anymore.
“Brides get nervous,” Layla said numbly, the kind of blank platitude that was entirely meaningless in the moment. A stalling tactic, a dodging tactic.
“Did you?”
Not even a little, she thought automatically.
She had been so calm from the moment Jamie had knelt in front of her, a ring in his hand, a shy smile on his lips. On the day of their wedding, she had waited patiently in the beautiful guest room at the house Jamie and Emily grew up in, her vows tucked into a cleverly hidden pocket at the side of her creamy, delicately pleated vintage skirt. She wouldn’t even need to look at them. When she walked down the aisle set up in the MacKenzies’ backyard, her eyes never left Jamie’s.
She was sosure. She was walking to her future, a future where she would be a part of something, of someone. A settled and forever part of a unit.
