She didn’t answer Griffin’s question—it was a taunt, more than a question, she thought—and after a few tense seconds, he spoke again.
“Emily wants to cancel tonight.”
Layla swallowed, suddenly feeling hot and hangover-sick. The plan for tonight—an evening appetizer cruise along the Seine,followed by a group dinner at a restaurant in the 16th—was meant to be a welcome for the small group of guests who were here for the whole week.
It was also meant to be the first event where Layla would prove to everyone that she was fine.
That she was thriving.
And she’d ruined it with something she couldn’t evenremember?
“She can’t,” Layla said quietly, not even really speaking to Griffin now, and yes—yes, too much of it was selfish, too much of it was about Layla’s pride and fear and guilt and determination to do this week in Paris exactly the way she’d planned.
But underneath all of that—at the core of Layla’s heart—there was something else, something concerned and loving. Layla thought of the light in Emily’s eyes last night as she’d talked about Michael, her genuine excitement and happiness about being here, about beginning a life with him.
Layla had to believe—shewantedto believe—that this desire to cancel tonight was an anomaly. Emily’s version of a temporary, fizzy-brained panic.
“I agree,” Griffin said.
She met his eyes again, jerked out of her thoughts. They stared at each other across the table, Griffin’s jaw ticking again, and his stare ruthlessly hard.
She felt a creeping sense of unease at agreeing with him onanyaspect of this situation.
She cleared her throat, a limp defense of Emily’s right to do whatever she wanted gathering there.
“I mean, shecan—” she began, but Griffin spoke over her.
“You need to fix this,” he said, so flatly that it sent a chill through her.
She thought of Emily saying that he didn’t leave his house very often, and she pictured it now: a dark, echoing mansion, a storybook sort of place with beams in the ceilings and furniture covered with white sheets, drafty and inhospitable, populated by stoic, quiet servants who heard directives like this from him all the time. He probably only practiced French for this precise reason.
To order people around.
She didn’t want to be one of them, but she also didn’t want this thing getting called off.
Apparently, he took her brief silence as resistance: He leaned slightly forward in his chair, resting a forearm on the table’s surface. Even beneath the black sleeve she could see it was flexed from the tension of the way he held his fist, his knuckles rippling. He was pulsing his fingers against the fat of his palm, like he was getting his veins ready for a blood draw.
“Michael is very important tome,” he said, borrowing his friend’s words about Layla. “And this wedding—Emily, marrying Emily—she is the most important thing to him. He—” He broke off, those knuckles fairly bulging now. “This has to happen for him. The wedding has to happen.”
For a few seconds, Layla’s own rising sense of desperation at the possibility of being responsible for ruining Emily’s wedding receded, sucked under by the sheer force of Griffin Testa’s intensity. She wanted to stay under this heavy, churning water for a minute and drown out her own anxiety about how she would fix this—because she would, of course, fix this; shehadto fix it, for Emily and Jamie and her former mother- and father-in-law and forherself—and only think about Griffin’s words and the way he said them.
Not a matter of marriage, but a matter of life and death.
This has to happen for him.
The wedding has to happen.
What in the world would make a man like Griffin Testa have a stake like this in someone else’s wedding?
When he leaned back, that fist retreating again, she realized that she had been staring—that she’d given up even bothering to look like she was coming up with an answer for him. He blinked and swallowed, as though he’d surprised himself, and Layla thought, dimly through the dark water, that this was an opening: his sword dropped, his guard down.
She wanted to say,What happened to you?
But he was faster than her: He stood suddenly from his seat, their cups and glasses vibrating slightly against the table’s surface. He reached down, steadying it or himself; she couldn’t be sure. But she was sure his hand shook as he did.
“I’ll fix it,” she said, inexplicably. “Tonight will happen.”
He looked down at her—always, he was looking down at her—and nodded once.
