When she finally slowed, it was at the curb of a busy street, a crosswalk right in front of them; on the other side of it waited the gray stone walls that flanked the river he’d seen, somewhat piecemeal, last night. She kept her head up, and when the traffic slowed, she stepped off the curb immediately. He almost grabbed her elbow, not trusting these speedy little cars and scooters that honked and swerved seemingly at random, but once again, she eluded him—straight out into the street, confident. A stride like she had a specific destination in mind.
Something got his back up, then. A twinge of suspicion like that pain in his leg.
“You seem to know what you’re doing,” he said when they made it across, the worst of the traffic noise fading behind them.
Layla cut to the right, and he followed, watching as her jaw ticked. He thought maybe she wouldn’t answer, and the twinge transformed into something more forceful.
But when she turned again, a left into a gap in the wall, and started to make her way down a steep ramp that would lead them to the river, she finally spoke again.
“I’ve been here before.”
That wasn’t strange, he supposed. People—other people, at least—traveled. And he didn’t know Layla Bailey’s life; maybe she was a frequent traveler. Maybe the city of Paris was some kind of second home to her. What did he know?
Except there was something in the way she said it. Something in how she slanted herself into the ramp’s descent, a stomping desperation that he recognized.
When they got to the bottom, the greenish-blue stripe of the river waited, momentarily distracting him. He could admit, heliked this better than the fussy park from this morning. Here, everything pretty was also slightly pockmarked: the soft gray pavers that formed a walkway along the water dotted with three worse-for-wear trash cans, set strangely close together; the canopies of bright green leaves of the thin-trunked trees on the opposite bank crudely interrupted by big gaps of uneven growth; the white and cream of the elegant buildings that rose up behind them capped with sooty, sometimes crooked chimney caps.
He felt, for once, like looking around for a minute.
But Layla Bailey stepped straight in front of him, turning her back on it all, and that suspicion reared up again.
He thought,Just ask her about Michael and Emily. Ignore the suspicion, and figure out what needs to be done next about Michael and Emily.
He said, “When?”
“What?”
“When have you been here before?”
She pursed her lips, and suspicion became a full-on presumption.
She’d been here before with the ex-husband. He’d bet on it.
He curled the fingers of his right hand into his palm, pressing hard.
Awfully fuckingimpolite of Emily to invite her to this.
Awfully fucking cruel.
“So, Emily,” Layla said, and then, without giving him a chance to say anything stupid and snarling and irrelevant, likeEmily, who shouldn’t have asked you to come to this wedding?, she launched into the sort of report that made her sound more like a doctor than anything she’d said since he met her.
And he tried to listen; he did. He heard her say that she had not, in fact, said anything disparaging about marriage to Emily,that Emily was feeling skittish about the move abroad, and about the shape the rest of her life would take. He heard her say that Emily loved Michael, but that she was “nervous”—this word, Layla said pointedly, anI-told-you-soholdover from their aborted breakfast—and that she knew calling the wedding off was too extreme for today, but that she still felt tentative about whether she could get there by the end of the week. He heard her say that Emily wanted to try focusing on time with Michael as much as she could.
But like a lot of times in his life where Griffin had listened to doctors talking to him, his mind was more than half on something else entirely. Usually, it was his pain—the sort of pain that made words seem meaningless to his ears, the sort that had him thinking he could feel individual particles of dust settling on his skin, the sort that somehow made him wish he’d never have to listen to anyone, anywhere, ever again.
Right now, though, he was thinking of how strangely she was holding herself as she talked: her shoulders set so deliberately parallel to the river, her neck stiff like she couldn’t turn it. When that loose swoop of hair blew slightly across her cheek, strands catching across the lenses of her enormous sunglasses, she didn’t even lift a hand to brush it away. Twice, people passed right behind her, too close for comfort, and if she clocked them, he couldn’t tell.
Before, when he’d been with her, what he hadn’t liked was the way it seemed as though she was seeing everything.
Now, she seemed as though she couldn’t see anything at all.
And he didn’t like that, either.
When exactly?he wanted to ask.When exactly did you come here with him?
But that question didn’t have anything to do with Michael, so he tried to think of a Daytime Griffin question. A polite question.
“So, what? We all…wait around until she decides?”
