“And Griffin,” Layla said, automatically, and wanted to kick herself for it. She cleared her throat. “I mean, he knows, too.”
Emily waved a hand. “Well, fine. The four of us, then.”
Layla did not like where this was headed.
“What about Rosie?” she said hopefully.
Emily shook her head. “I’m going to tell her it was a blip. That the champagne got to me, which she’ll believe, because she’s had beef with champagne for years. If she knows I’m still thinking about all this, she’ll watch Michael and me like a hawk all week. It’ll be so obvious. And there’s no way she won’t crack and blab about it to my parents or Jamie. You know how she is.”
Layla wanted to object to this claim aboutknowing how Rosie is, but then again, one night in a restaurant with Rosie was pretty revealing. She probably would blab. Loudly.
“Your parents would understand if you talked to them,” shesaid instead, thoughunderstandmight not be the right word, when it came to the MacKenzies.I don’t understand, Manon had said, about a million times, when Layla and Jamie had broken the news of their split. Robert had stared worriedly, deepening that confused, tipped-over trench between his eyes.
Emily pivoted, paced a longer path this time, and shook her head. “This wedding—they’ve invested so much into it. It means a lot to them, especially after you and Jamie…” She trailed off, winced.
Layla swallowed, ignored the gut-kick feeling of what Emily left unsaid. “Okay. I won’t tell anyone.”
It would be easy enough, she supposed. She could redo her itinerary to make it so she attended fewer of the wedding-related outings. Tonight’s welcome event, Friday’s open house, the wedding itself on Saturday night—all that was required, but most everything else had been pitched as “optional, but encouraged!” Layla had put about half those optional-but-encouraged things on her itinerary, wanting to show she was making a genuine effort.
Now, maybe Emily would want her to scale back even more. To prevent any accidental disclosures.
It could be a blessing in disguise. A reason to be even more scarce than she’d planned. God knew the MacKenzies were used to her being scarce by now. Maybe there’d be more of theI don’t understandstuff when Layla didn’t show up for things, but this time, all of it would be secretly in service of Emily’s needs. A favor to the family, really. Nothing for Layla to feel guilty about at all.
“And you being here for everything,” Emily said, “will help keep me grounded.”
Here for everything, Layla repeated back to herself nervously.
“Em, your family will be here. Rosie.”Your brother’s newgirlfriend, she thought, but swallowed it back. “It’s okay if you want to keep this between us, but those people can still be a support system for—”
“It’s not the same,” Emily said. “It’s not the same as you.”
Emily sat across from Layla again. This time, she was the one to lean forward, to take Layla’s hands and grip them tight.
“When I was doing the save-the-dates—god, the way I went back and forth on whether it was unfair to ask you to come to Paris. Especially with the memories you must have here. And the way you’d pulled back from the family after everything with you and Jamie. Like you—like you couldn’t be around us anymore.”
Layla could not meet Emily’s eyes now, because her own were weighted with tears. She stared down at their tangled-together fingers, as if she herself had been called out on sneaking more than a few cigarettes.
“I debated for weeks,” Emily continued. “You can ask Michael. But the morning they went out, I…I had thisfeeling, Layla. I had the envelope for you in my hand, and I felt deep down it was the right thing to ask you to come. I knew youneededto be here. And maybe this was why. Maybe I knew I couldn’t do this week without you. Maybe I knew I’d really need you.”
In that moment, Layla wanted nothing more than to be the version of herself that had first walked into this room: the no-wasting-time version, the get-the-job-done version. A monument to mind over matter.
She thought Griffin had been asking a lot of her, but…but this?
Being Emily’s bridal shadow, being a built-in buffer for her former in-laws, her ex-husband?
It felt beyond her.
Itwasbeyond her, as the last year and a half of her bolting outof their lives, going from job to job—doing anything, basically, to avoid the promised continued closeness—had proved.
“Emily,” was all she said.
“Please,” Emily said back, a single, desperate-sounding syllable that was almost as effective as seeing Griffin Testa’s white-knuckled fist curled on a café table.
Only almost, though, and it was as if Emily knew it. As if she could see that Layla was about to bolt again.
So she added something else.
Something that she must’ve known would get Layla to agree.
