Chapter 9 – June
JUNE
The hotel terrace hangs over the Aegean, and I've been sitting at this table for forty minutes pretending to read the same page of a novel while the coffee goes from hot to warm to a memory.
Below me, the water does its postcard thing.
Ferries drag white lines across the blue.
Somewhere behind me, the Parthenon sits on its rock in the morning haze, and I haven't looked at it yet.
I'm saving it. I've been saving it for eleven hours, since I walked into this suite alone at three in the morning and found the bed turned down for two.
One coffee. One yogurt with honey. One spoon.
The waiter keeps refilling my cup with the particular gentleness of a man who's decided not to ask where my husband is. I want to tell him it's fine, my husband is coming, he promised, but I learned a long time ago that repeating a man's promises to strangers makes them sound thinner, not truer.
"Mrs. Tierney."
I look up and there he is.
Matt crosses the terrace with his bag still on his shoulder, wrinkled shirt, stubble, sunglasses pushed up into hair that's gone flat from a plane seat. He looks destroyed. He also looks, I register with a small stupid flare of relief, here. Physically here. On this terrace. In this country.
"You made it."
"By morning." He checks his watch and winces. "Technically. If we round. Aggressively."
He drops the bag, drops into the chair across from me, and takes my hand off the table and holds it in both of his. His eyes are red. Not crying-red. No-sleep red, crisis red, the red of a man who has spent eighteen hours managing someone else's catastrophe.
"I'm here," he says. "I told you I'd be here. I'm here."
"You're here." I signal the waiter for a second coffee. "So tell me. Rob."
He exhales through his nose and lets go of my hand long enough to rub his face.
"They found him. He's fine. He's alive, he's healthy, he's—" Matt shakes his head, and something dark crosses his expression, something I don't often see aimed at anyone but a supplier.
"He's been living a double life, June. He has an apartment across town.
Lease in his name, two years. There's a woman. "
I set my cup down. "A woman."
"Her name's Danielle. She's twenty-nine.
She answered the door when the police knocked, in his shirt, confused about why anyone was looking for him, because as far as she knew he'd been away on a work trip.
" He laughs without any humor in it. "A work trip.
He told her he was traveling. He told Tanya he was—God, I don't even know what he told Tanya. The man's a whole fiction department."
"Two years," I say. "He's been with her for two years?"
"Longer. That's the part that—" He leans forward, drops his voice even though the nearest table is empty.
"He's been seeing her since before Tanya.
Three years, maybe more. She thought she was his girlfriend.
His actual, only girlfriend. She didn't know Tanya existed.
Tanya didn't know she existed. And somewhere in the middle of running two households, he got Tanya pregnant and proposed, and nobody on either side of the wall knew anything. "
The waiter arrives with the second coffee, pours it, and retreats. I stare out at the ferries.
I think about Rob at the restaurant. The flat blue eyes.
The whiskey. She does this everywhere we go.
Must be nice. Having a backup husband on retainer.
I thought I was watching a cold man tolerate a flirtatious fiancée.
I was watching a man who'd already left, sitting at the table out of scheduling obligations.
"How's Tanya?" I ask.
"How do you think." He drags a hand through his hair.
"She's shattered. She found out from the police, standing in that apartment, with this poor woman crying in the doorway.
Two victims meeting each other over a missing persons report.
Tanya's mom flew in last night. Her sister's coming Thursday.
The wedding's off, obviously. The baby—" He stops. "The baby's still coming.”
And there it is. Underneath everything—the scorekeeping, the ambushes, the Matty this and Matty that—I feel it arrive, unwelcome and undeniable.
Sympathy. Real sympathy.
Because I know exactly what Tanya Curtis is waking up to this morning.
Different specifics, same architecture. A life organized around a man who turns out to be only partially present.
A future she announced at a restaurant with a hand on her stomach, and the floor of it gone before the appetizers were cleared.
Twenty years she chased men who made her chase, and the shiniest one of all was never even in the race.
"Matt," I say slowly. "Maybe you should go back."
He blinks at me. "What?"
"I'm serious. She's pregnant and alone and the bottom just fell out of her entire life. Her mother's there, but her mother doesn't—" I gesture vaguely. "You're her person. You have been since you were seven. If you need to be there, go. We'll do Athens another time."
"No."
"Matt—"
"No, June." He takes my hand again, and this time he holds on with intent.
"Absolutely not. I got on a plane at midnight and sat in a middle seat in the back of some budget flight out of Frankfurt because the jet had already brought you and I was not—" He stops.
Starts over. "You have spent sixteen years rearranging yourself around everyone else's emergencies.
Around mine. Around hers. You planned her shower, you managed her venues, you talked her mother-in-law off a ledge, you spent your birthday alone handling her balloons. "
"Organic shapes," I say. "They work anywhere."
"I'm not joking."
"Neither am I. Gisele was very reassuring."
He stares at me for a second and then laughs, helpless, and it breaks something open in his face, and I see my husband under there. The one from the old kitchen. The one from Lisbon.
"She has her mother," he says. "She has her sister.
She has lawyers now, unfortunately. You know what she doesn't need?
Me hovering. And you know what you do have?
A husband who owes you about six birthdays, one anniversary dinner he took a phone call during, and one promise made on a couch eight months ago.
" He squeezes my hand. "This week is about you.
Full stop. Phone off, crisis closed, office on fire, I don't care.
You have sacrificed enough for everyone. Including me. Especially me."
I want to believe him. Sitting on this terrace with the water going gold at the edges and his hand warm around mine, I want to believe him so badly that I can feel myself deciding to.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay?"
"Okay."
He grins at me, the full one, the one that got him out of trouble in 1998 and keeps working, and he flags down the waiter and orders everything on the menu.
By lunch, I've almost convinced myself.
We walk the Plaka with no plan, which Matt treats as a radical act.
He buys me a pair of earrings from a street vendor and puts them on me himself, fingers clumsy at my ears.
We eat grilled octopus at a taverna with a cat asleep on the next chair.
He tells me a story about getting lost in Milan that has no point except to make me laugh, and it works.
Then his phone buzzes.
He glances at it. Puts it face-down. Pours me more wine.
"You can check it," I say.
"It's Denise. It's handled." He says it lightly. "It's fine."
It buzzes again at the ruins of the Agora. And again while we're buying figs from a man who refuses to let us leave without sampling three. Each time, Matt looks, silences it, and returns his attention to me with a visible effort that he thinks I can't see.
I can see it. It's in the half-second delay before he answers me. It's in his eyes drifting mid-sentence, catching on nothing, running some other conversation behind the one we're having. He's here. He's mostly here. He's a man standing in two rooms at once, and he's decided I can't tell.
"How's Tanya?" I ask at dinner, testing.
He doesn't even pretend to be surprised.
"Her sister's there now. She's eating. She's sleeping.
" He reaches across the table and takes my hand.
"I check twice a day. That's all. I promised her mother I'd be reachable, and then I promised you this week, and I'm keeping both.
The checking is nothing. It's a reflex. It's fine. "
It's fine. The slogan of our marriage. It's fine, go to the office. It's fine, take the jet alone. It's fine, I can zip my own dress.
"It's fine," I agree, and I mean it enough to say it, and I eat my lamb and drink my wine and let him refill my glass, and I collect the evening in pieces.
His hand on my back crossing the street.
His laugh at the waiter's joke. The earrings swinging against my neck, his fingerprints still warm in the metal.
Pieces. I've gotten very good at living on pieces.
On the third morning, we climb.
The Acropolis in the early light, before the crowds and the heat.
The marble underfoot is worn slick by twenty-five centuries of feet, and I take the stairs slowly, not because I'm too old to enjoy them but because I want them to last. Matt walks beside me, one step below, his hand hovering near my elbow on the steeper parts.
"Careful," he says. "These are the stairs."
"I know they're the stairs."
"The specific stairs. The ones from the couch. The whole reason we're?—"
"I know, Matt."
At the top, the Parthenon rises out of the rock in that light, the exact light, gold poured over old stone, and I stand where I said I wanted to stand, once, idly, to a man I assumed wasn't listening.
He was listening. It just took him eight months, a forgotten birthday, a courier, and a missing persons case to get here.
"Well?" he says.
Behind him, Athens spreads out to the sea, white and ancient and indifferent. His phone buzzes in his pocket. I watch him not check it. I watch what not checking it costs him—the twitch in his jaw, the thumb tapping once against his thigh, counting.
"It's beautiful," I say, and it is. That's the unbearable part. It is exactly as beautiful as I hoped.
He pulls me against his side and kisses my temple and murmurs, "We made it. See? I told you. Athens was waiting."
And I lean into him and look at the gold light on the old stone, standing in the precise spot I asked for, holding the hand I married, with everything I said I wanted arranged perfectly around me.
And I feel almost nothing.
The thought arrives quietly, without drama, the way true things do: he carried me up the stairs and left himself at the bottom.
I have his body, his hand, his kiss on my temple.
The rest of him is in a pocket, buzzing, five thousand miles away in a beige-living-roomed catastrophe with a redhead at the center of it.
I take the picture he offers to take of me. I smile for it. I've gotten good at that smile.
We made it, he said.
Standing there, I can't tell if that's a promise or an epitaph.