Chapter Five #2
This, at least, was the truth. Emily had walked through the hotel’s hallways with her arm looped through Layla’s, her cheeks pink and her smile huge and natural. She’d joked that Rosie and Layla were Chaos and Order, two poles that would keep her centered this week.
“She was laughing and excited. We didn’t talk about anything unusual. We…caught up.”
“Did you talk about your divorce?” Griffin said, a sneak attack. Plunging that blade right into the heart of her.
“Absolutely not,” she bit out.
“Right, why would you,” he said, his eyes doing a slow circuit of her face, checking for cracks. “It was amicable.”
In that moment, Layla hated him.
Hated him.
It was such a shocking, uncomfortable feeling for her—hot and unbounded and all-consuming—that she shifted in her chair.
The truth was, she was not sure if she’d ever really hated someone: hatred, she had always thought, was another one of those mind-under-matter collapses in the human experience, a failure of reason at best and a failure of empathy at worst. In the hospital—in whatever hospital Layla was in, no matter whether she’d been working there for a day or for weeks—people could tell this about her instinctively.
They sent her into rooms with the most belligerent patients, or worse, the most angry loved ones of patients, and she’d come out largely unbothered, offering some soft justification for their behavior.
They’re scared; they’re hurting; they’re hungry; they’re sad.
But she couldn’t, at this moment, think of any justification for Griffin Testa staring at her like this. Speaking to her like this. Saying amicable to her as if it was something to sneer at.
“Listen,” she said, barely recognizing her own voice, “I don’t remember saying anything that caused any particular reaction in Emily.
Certainly nothing about her wedding, or her relationship.
I told you she seemed fine last night, and I was telling you the truth.
Maybe you misunderstood something Michael said. Or maybe he was confused.”
“He was not confused.” He said the word with the same sneer in his voice as he did with amicable. As if it were completely impossible for Michael to ever be confused about anything.
She lifted her hands, palms up, in a sort of Well? gesture. “Then maybe you misunderstood.”
In the face of his disdain, this version of events started to take hold in her, to make more sense than any of Layla’s fizzy panic.
This hatred was clarifying, better than whatever coffee the server would bring out.
Layla had been buzzed last night, but not drunk.
More than that, she knew she’d never really stopped being attentive to her own performance in front of Emily and Rosie.
She knew she played her role, supportive-still-sort-of-sister-in-law.
And she would’ve known if something was wrong with Emily.
But Griffin? Griffin was the kind of man who stood in the aisle of a transatlantic flight and shut everyone up with a wild look in his eyes. He sweated in elevators, pressed buttons like they offended him, strode out into the Paris night as if he had a hound from hell biting at his heels.
Another clarifying thought, one that Layla didn’t enjoy even a little: Maybe the hound wasn’t metaphorical. Maybe Griffin had been going out onto the streets of Paris to find something chemical, something illegal—
A clink of dishes interrupted the grim thought, the server back with coffee.
Layla blinked down at her tiny cup, the liquid inside darker and heavier than the watered-down drip she was used to in the States.
On her honeymoon, French coffee—espresso, really—had been a revelation to her, its compact package a delicate contrast to the punch it packed.
At sidewalk café tables with Jamie, she had studied other patrons and their small, pursed-lip sips, the way they made that tiny cup last for as long as they wanted to linger.
She had imitated them so carefully, feeling grown-up and sophisticated and married.
Now, she had an embarrassingly American pang for a to-go cup.
She could feel Griffin watching her, waiting until the server left again.
“I did not misunderstand,” he said, when she was gone.
As though he’d never experienced a fizzy brain-bubble in his life.
“Michael woke me up at four o’clock this morning,” he continued dispassionately, methodically, as if he was proving to her a sobriety she hadn’t dared question out loud.
“Emily came to his hotel room at midnight, a half hour after you, apparently, got back from dinner. She explained to him that having you here was…”
He paused, obviously considering his words before going on.
“Very important to her,” he finished, and Layla decided that he hadn’t really been considering his words. He’d been gearing himself up to say something that he so clearly found unbelievable, like it was impossible for him to imagine Layla—aren’t you the ex?—being important to anyone.
She faked a pursed-lip sip, letting the espresso touch her lips but not taking any in. She just wanted an excuse to lower her eyes.
“She told him that you and she talked a lot at dinner, and that it got Emily to thinking about this week. She told him this”—he lifted an arm, cut his hand through the courtyard air quickly before lowering it again—“planning had taken up so much of her energy that she’d barely thought about their marriage. ”
“I said nothing about marriage. Nothing.”
There was a frantic note in her voice, and she wished desperately that she could call it back, because she worried it made her sound unsure, when this was the part of the conversation she should be most sure about.
Once the papers were signed, she avoided the topic—marriage in general, and hers in specific—with surgical precision, and had tried to train everyone she spoke to regularly in her life to do the same.
Sure, Cara still might ask How are you, really?
with a furrowed brow, or text things like Have you seen him yet!
but for everyone else, Layla had made it vague, indistinct.
A universe scattered across multiple dimensions. Too big to contemplate.
“Nevertheless,” was all Griffin said in reply.
Nevertheless, it was you.
His eyes, so relentlessly on her, were the same rich brown-black as her espresso. She replayed everything he’d said so far—that having Layla here was important to Emily, that they’d talked a lot at dinner, that it got Emily to thinking—and had a horrible, heartrending thought.
What if it hadn’t been something she said at all?
What if it was merely the fact that she’d come here in the first place?
What if, despite Emily’s very best hopes and intentions in inviting her here, all Layla could ever be was a reminder of the way marriages—even the ones where two people really loved each other—could fail?
She pushed the tiny cup and saucer toward the middle of the table. She had no appetite for its jolting lucidity anymore.
“Brides get nervous,” Layla said numbly, the kind of blank platitude that was entirely meaningless in the moment. A stalling tactic, a dodging tactic.
“Did you?”
Not even a little, she thought automatically.
She had been so calm from the moment Jamie had knelt in front of her, a ring in his hand, a shy smile on his lips.
On the day of their wedding, she had waited patiently in the beautiful guest room at the house Jamie and Emily grew up in, her vows tucked into a cleverly hidden pocket at the side of her creamy, delicately pleated vintage skirt.
She wouldn’t even need to look at them. When she walked down the aisle set up in the MacKenzies’ backyard, her eyes never left Jamie’s.
She was so sure. She was walking to her future, a future where she would be a part of something, of someone. A settled and forever part of a unit.
She didn’t answer Griffin’s question—it was a taunt, more than a question, she thought—and after a few tense seconds, he spoke again.
“Emily wants to cancel tonight.”
Layla swallowed, suddenly feeling hot and hangover-sick. The plan for tonight—an evening appetizer cruise along the Seine, followed by a group dinner at a restaurant in the 16th—was meant to be a welcome for the small group of guests who were here for the whole week.
It was also meant to be the first event where Layla would prove to everyone that she was fine.
That she was thriving.
And she’d ruined it with something she couldn’t even remember?
“She can’t,” Layla said quietly, not even really speaking to Griffin now, and yes—yes, too much of it was selfish, too much of it was about Layla’s pride and fear and guilt and determination to do this week in Paris exactly the way she’d planned.
But underneath all of that—at the core of Layla’s heart—there was something else, something concerned and loving. Layla thought of the light in Emily’s eyes last night as she’d talked about Michael, her genuine excitement and happiness about being here, about beginning a life with him.
Layla had to believe—she wanted to believe—that this desire to cancel tonight was an anomaly. Emily’s version of a temporary, fizzy-brained panic.
“I agree,” Griffin said.
She met his eyes again, jerked out of her thoughts. They stared at each other across the table, Griffin’s jaw ticking again, and his stare ruthlessly hard.
She felt a creeping sense of unease at agreeing with him on any aspect of this situation.
She cleared her throat, a limp defense of Emily’s right to do whatever she wanted gathering there.
“I mean, she can—” she began, but Griffin spoke over her.
“You need to fix this,” he said, so flatly that it sent a chill through her.
She thought of Emily saying that he didn’t leave his house very often, and she pictured it now: a dark, echoing mansion, a storybook sort of place with beams in the ceilings and furniture covered with white sheets, drafty and inhospitable, populated by stoic, quiet servants who heard directives like this from him all the time.
He probably only practiced French for this precise reason.
To order people around.
She didn’t want to be one of them, but she also didn’t want this thing getting called off.
Apparently, he took her brief silence as resistance: He leaned slightly forward in his chair, resting a forearm on the table’s surface.
Even beneath the black sleeve she could see it was flexed from the tension of the way he held his fist, his knuckles rippling.
He was pulsing his fingers against the fat of his palm, like he was getting his veins ready for a blood draw.
“Michael is very important to me,” he said, borrowing his friend’s words about Layla. “And this wedding—Emily, marrying Emily—she is the most important thing to him. He—” He broke off, those knuckles fairly bulging now. “This has to happen for him. The wedding has to happen.”
For a few seconds, Layla’s own rising sense of desperation at the possibility of being responsible for ruining Emily’s wedding receded, sucked under by the sheer force of Griffin Testa’s intensity.
She wanted to stay under this heavy, churning water for a minute and drown out her own anxiety about how she would fix this—because she would, of course, fix this; she had to fix it, for Emily and Jamie and her former mother- and father-in-law and for herself—and only think about Griffin’s words and the way he said them.
Not a matter of marriage, but a matter of life and death.
This has to happen for him.
The wedding has to happen.
What in the world would make a man like Griffin Testa have a stake like this in someone else’s wedding?
When he leaned back, that fist retreating again, she realized that she had been staring—that she’d given up even bothering to look like she was coming up with an answer for him.
He blinked and swallowed, as though he’d surprised himself, and Layla thought, dimly through the dark water, that this was an opening: his sword dropped, his guard down.
She wanted to say, What happened to you?
But he was faster than her: He stood suddenly from his seat, their cups and glasses vibrating slightly against the table’s surface. He reached down, steadying it or himself; she couldn’t be sure. But she was sure his hand shook as he did.
“I’ll fix it,” she said, inexplicably. “Tonight will happen.”
He looked down at her—always, he was looking down at her—and nodded once.
“Your breakfast is on my room tab,” he said.
And then, for the second time in a single morning, he turned and left her alone.