“Do you want to duck out?” Rosie said, and the truth was, even the gentlest note of pity from Rosie—truth-telling but still slightly oblivious Rosie—was worse than sympathy from Jamie, or Samantha, or probably every other person from their party who was looking at her now.
She was about to say no. She’d already, in fact, turned back to Rosie and put the placid smile on her lips.
But then someone said, “Emily,” too loud for a museum, and both she and Rosie turned to find Michael striding across the black-and-white tile of the vestibule, crossing beneath the arch into the room where they all stood in this awkward tableau, not even stopping for a second of staring atThe Kiss.
He went straight to Emily.
Bent to kiss her. Not likeThe Kiss, not secret and sensual. A short but seriousI’m sorrykiss, which still made Layla ache with longing.
And not for anyone that was in this room with her right now.
“I shouldn’t have stayed back,” Michael said to a soft-eyed, glowing Emily. “Want to start from the beginning?”
Emily beamed, and big-sister Layla was genuinely happy, but also—also, there was that other half of her body, pulling down that middle line, thinking of Griffin.
Where is he?
Is he okay?
Would he like to seeThe Kiss?
For once, she didn’t really care what everyone thought about what she would do next.
She hoped that their collective attention had been turned, at least, to the couple that this week was truly all about—Michael’s minor grand gesture, and Emily’s clear adoration of it.
But if it wasn’t—if it wasn’t, and they all thought that she’d stared at that sculpture a little too long, too intensely, too longingly, and thought of Jamie—well.
Well, that was fine for now.
“I’m going to go outside,” she whispered to Rosie, and then, without looking at anyone else, she left the room.
* * *
She didn’t find him at first.
She figured—wrongly—that he would’ve started toward the beginning, or at least the beginning according to the path most people followed when they entered. The rose garden, lush and fragrant, conical shrubberies at its center, surrounding another famed, pedestaled figure:The Thinker. Layla knew that if she stood just so, facing him head on in his curved, contemplative bronze glory, she would see the top of the Eiffel Tower in the blue sky behind him, like it had sprung from his head as another grand, fully formed idea, all in a day’s work.
But she didn’t stand just so. She kept going, walking too fast for a park this beautiful, for a place dotted with art. She made it all the way to a grand, circular fountain, a bronze sculpture in the center that looked too cruel to contemplate, and turned back, staying on the westward side of the gardens now, growing more determined.Ignored faces and bodies carved from stone or cast from bronze and looked instead at every real person she passed and thought,Not Griffin, Not Griffin, Not Griffin.
Finally, she saw him.
Standing alone, perfectly still, in front of a bronze-cast sculpture, onyx-black: three men, naked and huddled together, heads bent awkwardly in, each of them with an arm extended to a center point between them.
For a few seconds, she didn’t move. She thought how odd it was that he stood so alone there, as though everyone milling about—a not insignificant number of people—had looked at him in his all-black, not-bronze glory, and decided to leave him be.
She thought,ShouldIleave him be? Like he asked me to last night, like he forced me to last night?
As though he heard her ask the question of herself, he shifted his eyes away from the sculpture and looked straight at her.
Nothing so cold as sympathy.
Nothing so simple asI’m sorry.
He kept his eyes on her, and took one deliberate step to the side.
Making room for her beside him.
When she stood next to him, he was already looking again at the figures: eyes up, expression grave, and she felt unequal to the moment, unsure of whether to speak. She looked in vain for a placard to read, and had a disturbing urge to apologize to Fitz, who maybe was reading, obsessively reading, because he had no idea what to say.
