When she pulled back, though, she looked, again, entirely unbothered. She turned toward the wide-eyed woman at Jamie’s side, extended a hand, and said, “And you must be Samantha. I’ve heard so many wonderful things about you,” and it was like watching her with the girl on the plane—a realeverything is completely fineenergy that seemed to give everyone—including too-young, teetering Samantha—permission to let out their held breath.
In seconds, most of the party moved forward—Emily and Michael, still entangled, Michael’s future mother- and father-in-law, the other older couple whose names Griffin had already forgotten. All of them crowding around the new arrivals and Layla, one big happy family that he didn’t trust for a second.
“She’s very good, isn’t she?” said a voice from beside him, and he looked over and down to see chestnut-necklace lady, her eyes on where Layla stood, still smiling and chatting in an unholy triangle with her ex-husband and the ex-husband’s apparent new girlfriend.
“Who?” he said, because he was a lot of things—mean and impatient and reclusive and single-minded—but he wasn’t fucking stupid.
The necklace lady didn’t answer him. She stood beside him until that tinkling bell rang again and the boat beneath them began to move, and then she slipped a small hand into the crook of his left elbow, shooting a jagged slice of pain all the way to the side of his neck.
It was almost comforting. He did not move a muscle. Didn’t make a sound.
She said, “Walk me over to the table?”
And he did, letting it hurt the whole way.
* * *
“So,in a way, Paris has always been our family’s second home.”
The woman Griffin now knew as Emily’s aunt Céline was still, an hour later, at his side—not touching now, but next to him at the table where small plates of a tuna tartare that Griffin didn’t eat much of had just been cleared. In that time, she had told him a whole host of things that he had not cared about: her job in New York City as a fabric designer (“upholstery, not that you asked”), her current boyfriend Otto who “dabbled” (Who says a word like dabbled?Griffin thought) in music, her recently deceased cat (“A tabby, you know how those are”; Griffin did not), her long-standing cold war with the president of her building’s co-op board (related to the recently deceased cat). Through all of it, he had been his usual self, which is to say, he had not encouraged her, in any way, to continue speaking.
Until now.
“Say that again,” he said.
She looked up at him, surprised, which he couldn’t blame her for. For better or worse, they had settled into a strange norm down here at their end of the table: Céline talked, and Griffin did not.
“I said that Paris has always been—”
“Before that,” Griffin interrupted.
“Has anyone ever told you that you have terrible manners?”
He didn’t answer. Anyway, the sun was getting lower now: harder and harder to be Daytime Griffin.
She rolled her eyes. “Isaidthat Emily spent part of her summers here as a child.”
“With her grandmother.”
“Terrible manners and a mediocre listener,” Céline said. “Withmygrandmother. She was born here, and moved to the States withmy grandfather, and then when he passed away, she bought a pied-à-terre here. Manon and I have always been very connected to our French roots, and obviously she’s tried to—”
“He came, too?” Griff cut her off again.
Céline blinked. “He—?” she began, but must’ve followed the flick of Griffin’s eyes toward the ex. “Yes. Manon would bring them both.”
He nodded, sipped at his glass of room-temperature water, which was not in any way refreshing, but also not as off-putting as the tuna. It had been served in the shape of a firm little disc, and Griffin had thought:This looks like food you’d give to a tabby cat in a New York City apartment.
“Why do you ask?” Céline said.
“No reason,” he said, not caring now that Céline would know he was lying. What he cared about was that he had at least a partial answer for what he’d been so suspicious about this morning when he was walking with Layla: This city was the sort of place the MacKenzie siblings had a strong enough tie to that they’d want to bring partners here, want to have whole weddings here.
“They honeymooned here,” Céline said. “My nephew and Layla. She’d never been able to come before, what with all her schooling, summer internships, and such.”
Griffin tried to keep his face completely expressionless, but Céline’s next words proved he hadn’t managed it.
Maybe he was getting stupider by the second. The collision with Layla like a concussion he was wearing on his face.
“I was also surprised. A bit insensitive to invite her, I thought, but as they say, the split was perfectly amic—”
