Chapter Seven #3
Emily’s face softened at the mention of her fiancé.
“I do love him. So much. He is—everything. The very best man. I don’t want you to think I don’t love him.”
At that, Griffin nudged his way back into Layla’s consciousness. She thought of the fierceness in his eyes, his voice, when he spoke of his friend.
She thought of his tight fist, his white knuckles.
Michael is very important to me.
This has to happen for him.
She wondered again what Michael—this man Emily loved—could’ve done to earn the unchecked loyalty of someone like Griffin Testa, who seemed like the sort of person who would only have loyalty to himself.
“I don’t think that,” she said, squeezing Emily’s clammy hands, bringing herself back into this moment. Away from the ones she’d had with Griffin.
Just Emily and Layla, she thought, her own version of the Just today refrain. Honestly, it was better than any affirmation she’d come up with on the flight over here. She should put it in the translation app.
Emily squeezed back, and then she said, in a near-whisper of vulnerability that might as well have been reading Layla’s mind: “I really missed you, Lay. I really missed having you in my life.”
At that, Layla’s throat thickened with emotion, the weight of her absence from Emily’s life, the weight of her broken promises since the divorce so heavy now.
Again, she was struck by the urge to apologize—to say that she hadn’t meant to become someone to be missed—but she didn’t know if she could get it out.
So instead, she kept it simple. “I missed you, too.”
They gave each other shaky smiles.
“I’m still not sure,” Emily said finally, pulling her hands from Layla’s, fanning her face for a few seconds before gesturing widely at the room—the suitcases full of wedding-week clothes, the still-covered windows.
“About all of this. But today, I can do. I want to do. Or, I don’t know—I want to try doing? For Michael and me.”
Layla thought, again—against her will—of Griffin, and of the promise she’d made to him.
I’ll fix it. Tonight will happen.
And the fact that she’d kept it.
She tried to imagine his reaction when he found out. Would he give her that are-you-the-ex face, the-floor-is-probably-disgusting face?
Or would there be that split-second look of vulnerability that passed over his features in the courtyard, before he stood to leave her? Would he look at her like that again, would he soften his voice long enough to say thank you, would he—
“I mean, I’ll need your help, of course.”
Emily’s now-more-normal voice cut through Layla’s extremely fantastical train of thought.
“My…help?”
“I feel like”—Emily began, rising to pace again—“you’re kind of…
the person, you know? The only person who really understands where I’m at with this.
With how I’m feeling, and with the whole ‘just today’ thing.
If that’s what I’m going to do—if I’m really going to give me and Michael a chance to work through this over the course of the week, I can’t have everyone knowing about it.
Adding their opinion in. I need this to be between you and me and Michael. ”
“And Griffin,” Layla said, automatically, and wanted to kick herself for it. She cleared her throat. “I mean, he knows, too.”
Emily waved a hand. “Well, fine. The four of us, then.”
Layla did not like where this was headed.
“What about Rosie?” she said hopefully.
Emily shook her head. “I’m going to tell her it was a blip.
That the champagne got to me, which she’ll believe, because she’s had beef with champagne for years.
If she knows I’m still thinking about all this, she’ll watch Michael and me like a hawk all week.
It’ll be so obvious. And there’s no way she won’t crack and blab about it to my parents or Jamie. You know how she is.”
Layla wanted to object to this claim about knowing how Rosie is, but then again, one night in a restaurant with Rosie was pretty revealing. She probably would blab. Loudly.
“Your parents would understand if you talked to them,” she said instead, though understand might not be the right word, when it came to the MacKenzies.
I don’t understand, Manon had said, about a million times, when Layla and Jamie had broken the news of their split.
Robert had stared worriedly, deepening that confused, tipped-over trench between his eyes.
Emily pivoted, paced a longer path this time, and shook her head. “This wedding—they’ve invested so much into it. It means a lot to them, especially after you and Jamie…” She trailed off, winced.
Layla swallowed, ignored the gut-kick feeling of what Emily left unsaid. “Okay. I won’t tell anyone.”
It would be easy enough, she supposed. She could redo her itinerary to make it so she attended fewer of the wedding-related outings.
Tonight’s welcome event, Friday’s open house, the wedding itself on Saturday night—all that was required, but most everything else had been pitched as “optional, but encouraged!” Layla had put about half those optional-but-encouraged things on her itinerary, wanting to show she was making a genuine effort.
Now, maybe Emily would want her to scale back even more. To prevent any accidental disclosures.
It could be a blessing in disguise. A reason to be even more scarce than she’d planned.
God knew the MacKenzies were used to her being scarce by now.
Maybe there’d be more of the I don’t understand stuff when Layla didn’t show up for things, but this time, all of it would be secretly in service of Emily’s needs.
A favor to the family, really. Nothing for Layla to feel guilty about at all.
“And you being here for everything,” Emily said, “will help keep me grounded.”
Here for everything, Layla repeated back to herself nervously.
“Em, your family will be here. Rosie.” Your brother’s new girlfriend, she thought, but swallowed it back. “It’s okay if you want to keep this between us, but those people can still be a support system for—”
“It’s not the same,” Emily said. “It’s not the same as you.”
Emily sat across from Layla again. This time, she was the one to lean forward, to take Layla’s hands and grip them tight.
“When I was doing the save-the-dates—god, the way I went back and forth on whether it was unfair to ask you to come to Paris. Especially with the memories you must have here. And the way you’d pulled back from the family after everything with you and Jamie.
Like you—like you couldn’t be around us anymore. ”
Layla could not meet Emily’s eyes now, because her own were weighted with tears. She stared down at their tangled-together fingers, as if she herself had been called out on sneaking more than a few cigarettes.
“I debated for weeks,” Emily continued. “You can ask Michael. But the morning they went out, I…I had this feeling, Layla. I had the envelope for you in my hand, and I felt deep down it was the right thing to ask you to come. I knew you needed to be here. And maybe this was why. Maybe I knew I couldn’t do this week without you. Maybe I knew I’d really need you.”
In that moment, Layla wanted nothing more than to be the version of herself that had first walked into this room: the no-wasting-time version, the get-the-job-done version. A monument to mind over matter.
She thought Griffin had been asking a lot of her, but…but this?
Being Emily’s bridal shadow, being a built-in buffer for her former in-laws, her ex-husband?
It felt beyond her.
It was beyond her, as the last year and a half of her bolting out of their lives, going from job to job—doing anything, basically, to avoid the promised continued closeness—had proved.
“Emily,” was all she said.
“Please,” Emily said back, a single, desperate-sounding syllable that was almost as effective as seeing Griffin Testa’s white-knuckled fist curled on a café table.
Only almost, though, and it was as if Emily knew it. As if she could see that Layla was about to bolt again.
So she added something else.
Something that she must’ve known would get Layla to agree.
Something that Layla imagined would feel exactly like having a white-knuckled fist driven right into her stomach.
She said, “You promised you’d always be my sister.”