He noticed her jaw tighten at that.
“Rosie doesn’t have a date,” she finally said. “And she’s not family. You’re the best man, and she’s the maid of honor. If you think about it,thatmakes more sense. For being…friends.”
The pause there, it was speaking. A stutter over a different sort of idea.
I don’t want to play pretend with Rosie, he thought automatically.
“But Rosie isn’t the problem,” he said instead, and before she could do with that what he knew she’d been doing all night, what she’d been telling herself all night, what she’d tried to say to him back in the Galeries, when he knew, heknewshe was thinking about leaving, he added, “We are.”
“Why do you keepsayingthat?”
He shrugged. “We’re the ones who know. About Emily and Michael.”
If she clocked that he hadn’treallyanswered her—that he wouldn’t admit to exploding out of his seat on that boat anddragging her off it, that doing that had felt like a very modest concession to his other idea, which was to throw her ex-husband over the edge of it, hopefully directly into the splash of his new girlfriend’s vomit—she didn’t say.
She said, “What do you propose?”
So now, here he was, Paris at dawn, pretending he hadn’t said any of it: that if Layla stuck close, if she made it seem like she was striking up a friendship with some stranger on this trip, if they paired off on whatever horrible forced-sightseeing outings they went on over the next few days, people would stop wondering if Layla was worrying about the ex.
“You won’t seem so alone,” he’d said at one point, and she practically exploded at him.
“There’snothingwrong with being alone!”
There isn’t, he thought now, staring longingly up at one of those bell towers, his mind’s eye covering them in smoke damage again, making a home for himself and all his small, monstrous thoughts, the ones he had when he was most alone.
His phone blared a long, shrill ring.
“Fuck,” he muttered, shoving a hand into his pocket, pressing the button on the side so it would not, at least, disturb the peace out here any further. His game of pretend disastrously compromised, since he’d have no use for a fucking cell phone in a burned-out bell tower.
He was pretty sure who it was before he pulled it from his pocket. Despite his not actually living in a bell tower, very few people had his number, fewer ever called it. Even Michael usually texted first.
He had, in fact, finally exchanged numbers with Layla last night, what with the plan and all, but he had the feeling a pretend friend wouldn’t have cause to use it, at least not at this hour.
“Hey, Mom,” he said, when he confirmed his suspicion and swiped his finger across the screen.
“I knew you’d be up,” she said, in that way she had, no bullshit, no sugarcoating it.
“Out walking,” he said, though he hadn’t been walking for a while now. He was only standing here, staring up at this both old and new church, talking into his phone quietly like he was actually inside its sacred walls.
“Early there.”
“Late there,” he answered.
There was a stretch of silence on the line, or rather, his mother’s particular silence, which meant there was always something happening in the background: a gate being closed, a bucket being tossed, dishes being washed, something. Six hours behind, he figured the faint clinking he heard was tea-making.
She still made some every night before bed, same as she had his whole life, even when she’d had to sleep during the days, accommodating whatever punishing shift she happened to be on.
His eyes drifted to the other bell tower, the one he hadn’t been looking at, and he pictured his wiry, hardy mother, brown-gray braid down her back, scrubbing its walls clean. Shouting out of one of her stone arches a few times a day, asking whether the monster across the way was up yet.
“You sleeping at all?” she asked eventually.
“A bit,” he said, which was not a lie. He’d actually slept last night, four hours at least, which was a good stretch for him. He had a dream, too, but not the sort he’d say anything about to his mother.
It had to do with that sweater Layla got.
That he got for her.
“What’s that?” she said.
