Lose your train of thought, he telegraphed to Emily’s father.Stare at my fucked-up face and wonder about it, if it makes you forget what you were talking about. Move on to welcome someone else.
But before Griffin could really rationalize what he’d done there, distracting everyone from staring at Layla, who was still—no matter what her posture conveyed—sitting inside the stomach of this gigantic MacKenzie family beast, another distraction took hold.
Samantha scooted her chair back from the table. A gritty scrape across the deck that sent a jolt of discomfort down the left side of his neck. When she stood, she teetered again, even though Griffin could see she had a tight grip on Jamie’s hand.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m feeling a little—”
She cut herself off, putting her other hand over her mouth.
Déjà vu, Griffin thought, a French phrase he didn’t even have to reach for in the recesses of his newly language-app-trained mind.He remembered the girl on the plane, who’d turned the same pallid color as this woman before she’d fainted. Samantha stood still for a second, hand over her mouth, holding everyone at the table in a moment of dreadful suspense before spinning from her chair and bolting clumsily away from the table, pulling her hand from Jamie’s.
She shuffle-ran across the deck as far as she could, presumably, before she ran out of time.
And then she reached for a railing, and retched over the side.
Chapter Eleven
At first, there was a long beat of stunned, possibly revolted silence.
And then, everyone seemed to erupt like tiny individual volcanoes, variant in their force. Jamie vaulted from his chair suddenly, but then stood stock-still, as if someone had pressed the pause button. Manon gasped and grabbed up at Robert’s arm, rising more slowly and staring after Samantha in the same way she’d looked at those petunias being eaten. Emily’s hands jolted up to clap over her own startled gasp, Michael’s “Oh no” a bubbling echo, setting off Damaris’s quiet “Oh dear,” and her husband’s gruff “Indeed.”
Rosie, as usual, held nothing back, standing from her own seat and saying, “A hundred euros that it was the tuna,” which made Céline crack out an inappropriate laugh.
It felt like only Layla sat still, her brain sluggish to process the disaster of the last minute and a half: Her former father-in-law had thanked her for coming, had said she was still like a daughter to him, and then her ex-husband’s new girlfriend hadliterallygotten sick.
She didn’t see how this didn’t ruin a boat cruise.
Let alone a whole entire wedding week.
She blinked, trying to snap out of her stupor, but when her eyes focused again, they went straight to the only other person who’d remained perfectly still and silent.
Griffin Testa.
For once, he wasn’t looking right at her.
He was looking beside her, at where Emily and Michael still sat, his face set in barely leashed frustration. She could imagine that his hand—that very same hand he’d touched her with—was back to its white-knuckledFix itfist.
She let her gaze follow his, seeing now that Emily had dropped her hands again, her expression slack. There was a vacant, trancelike look in her eyes, as though a vision of the future was passing before her mind.
A future where this wedding failed.
This cannot possibly get more fucked-up, Layla thought, which, as any doctor knew, was always the thought you had right before things got immeasurably more fucked-up.
“Jamie,” Robert said, a scolding note in his voice.
Apparently, no one had yet pressed the play button on Jamie again, because Layla’s ex-husband still stood frozen a few steps away from the table. He wasn’tquitelooking toward Samantha, who had most of her front half still hanging over the boat’s railing.
“Oh, man,” he said. “You know how I get when someone…you know, when there’s, ah—”
Layla lifted her napkin from her lap and put it on the table. She knew how he would finish that sentence. During her first year of residency she’d gotten norovirus, one of the top five worst experiences of her life, including this boat cruise, and Jamie and his notoriously weak stomach had only ever been able to come as close as the closed bathroom door. Layla had thought it was sweet—endearing, really—the way he sat in the hallway for hours. She’d laughed weakly at him when she finally emerged, finding him asleep with noise-canceling headphones on, the sounds of her sickness so distressing to him.
She pushed back her chair.
“I’ll go,” said Emily weakly, but Layla could not let that happen. God forbid Samantha had something contagious, and gave it to Emily.
“I’ll go,” said Layla. “Obviously, I’ll go.”
“Lay,” Em said, concern in her voice, but Layla pretended not to hear it.
