Chapter Eight #2
He stared at her, confused. “What?”
“I don’t know if I fixed it.”
Oh. Right.
“Tonight is on,” she added. “But I don’t know about everything else.”
He waited for a familiar feeling to come over him—frustration, impatience, irritation. If they were there—in his body, his mind—he couldn’t access them.
But if she was waiting for him to say something consoling, something kind—something like, It’s okay—he couldn’t access that, either.
He thought of sitting in that strange, squared-off park with Michael, everything pretty and pristine, the clear sky a rare robin’s-egg blue.
He thought of Layla Bailey’s cheeks turning pink in the sunlight.
No. He thought of the promise he’d made to himself while sitting beside Michael: If she couldn’t fix this alone, he’d find a way to fix it with her.
And that’s what he’d need to do now.
“Let’s get out of this fucking hallway,” he said abruptly. “This hotel.”
She blinked up at him with her big, muddy-brown eyes, and he watched as her lips rolled inward, her throat moving in a heavy swallow.
He did not think getting out of the hotel was such a terrible idea, but he supposed she had reason to be nervous about going to a second location with him.
Fine, they could go back to that courtyard with the terrible chairs, or—
“Okay,” she said.
He hoped she wouldn’t notice him letting out—very, very slowly—the breath he’d been holding. But just in case, to cover his bases, he thought it would be wise to distract her.
“Sun came out,” he said curtly, turning to make his way down the hall. “You’ll probably need sunglasses.”
* * *
He waited for her in front of the hotel, trying not to pace for fear of further disturbing the doorman, who was a starer of the “showing disgust” variety.
Normally, Griff took that sort of thing as an opportunity to be defiant, even scary, but he figured the doorman could be a good first test of the daytime Griffin he was trying to be.
So instead, he simply stood what he thought was a few polite steps down from the hotel’s wide, sleek glass doors, staring across the street at a building that looked much more like it belonged here, based on what he’d seen of this city so far.
That cream-gray stone, shutters flanking old, tall paned windows, each with ironwork railings, and beneath them all, two huge arched and paneled entry doors painted a rich dark blue, a brass knob right in the middle of both.
He was thinking about how that was the sort of door that actually deserved a doorman when she stepped up beside him.
“Hello,” she said. Businesslike, which he guessed was better, for him personally, than doctor-like.
He turned to look at her, felt a stupid degree of satisfaction that she’d taken his advice about the sunglasses, though he thought they were a little big for her face. He couldn’t even see all of her eyebrows.
Not that he needed to see much of her face.
The sunglasses were a blessing, to be honest.
She had a purse over her shoulder but nothing else—not the hot chocolate or the little bag of croissants.
“Did you eat?” he said, for no good reason.
Except that twice this morning, he and this woman had been in the presence of French pastries, which no one ever stopped going on about, and he hadn’t seen her have one.
He hadn’t, either, but his body still felt too jet-lagged and outside-of-time for food. It wasn’t the same for him.
“I’m not hungry,” she said.
He nodded in the direction that he’d walked this morning on his way to meet Michael. There’s no way she wasn’t hungry. “There’s a bunch of cafés down that way.”
He was just being polite.
“I don’t want to go sit in a café like this.”
He looked her over, bottom to top, grateful that he’d stopped first in his room and had his own eyes covered now. She was wearing the same thing she’d had on earlier. Sneakers and wide-legged black pants and a white button-up that looked a little wrinkled, but otherwise normal.
“Like what?”
“I’m not…dressed.”
He stared. Not in disgust, obviously. More in bewilderment. In fact she was maximally dressed. This morning he’d seen her in a robe, for Christ’s sake. And last night he’d been able to see a glimpse of her collarbones. Her slim, muscular calves in that skirt, flexed in the heels she wore.
Maximally dressed was also a blessing.
“Let’s go this way,” she said, and then marched right past him, in the opposite direction he’d suggested.
He had to hustle to catch up, his leg smarting ominously with the quick movement.
She crossed the street at a diagonal, one hand clutched around the strap of her bag, her strides long and purposeful, avoiding random puddles, occasional dog waste.
On account of the sunglasses, he couldn’t tell if she was taking much in around her, but there was no way she’d seen those big doors.
He thought she would’ve at least paused if she had.
There was no arguing that they were interesting, especially compared to the hotel ones.
When she finally slowed, it was at the curb of a busy street, a crosswalk right in front of them; on the other side of it waited the gray stone walls that flanked the river he’d seen, somewhat piecemeal, last night.
She kept her head up, and when the traffic slowed, she stepped off the curb immediately.
He almost grabbed her elbow, not trusting these speedy little cars and scooters that honked and swerved seemingly at random, but once again, she eluded him—straight out into the street, confident.
A stride like she had a specific destination in mind.
Something got his back up, then. A twinge of suspicion like that pain in his leg.
“You seem to know what you’re doing,” he said when they made it across, the worst of the traffic noise fading behind them.
Layla cut to the right, and he followed, watching as her jaw ticked. He thought maybe she wouldn’t answer, and the twinge transformed into something more forceful.
But when she turned again, a left into a gap in the wall, and started to make her way down a steep ramp that would lead them to the river, she finally spoke again.
“I’ve been here before.”
That wasn’t strange, he supposed. People—other people, at least—traveled. And he didn’t know Layla Bailey’s life; maybe she was a frequent traveler. Maybe the city of Paris was some kind of second home to her. What did he know?
Except there was something in the way she said it. Something in how she slanted herself into the ramp’s descent, a stomping desperation that he recognized.
When they got to the bottom, the greenish-blue stripe of the river waited, momentarily distracting him.
He could admit, he liked this better than the fussy park from this morning.
Here, everything pretty was also slightly pockmarked: the soft gray pavers that formed a walkway along the water dotted with three worse-for-wear trash cans, set strangely close together; the canopies of bright green leaves of the thin-trunked trees on the opposite bank crudely interrupted by big gaps of uneven growth; the white and cream of the elegant buildings that rose up behind them capped with sooty, sometimes crooked chimney caps.
He felt, for once, like looking around for a minute.
But Layla Bailey stepped straight in front of him, turning her back on it all, and that suspicion reared up again.
He thought, Just ask her about Michael and Emily. Ignore the suspicion, and figure out what needs to be done next about Michael and Emily.
He said, “When?”
“What?”
“When have you been here before?”
She pursed her lips, and suspicion became a full-on presumption.
She’d been here before with the ex-husband. He’d bet on it.
He curled the fingers of his right hand into his palm, pressing hard.
Awfully fucking impolite of Emily to invite her to this.
Awfully fucking cruel.
“So, Emily,” Layla said, and then, without giving him a chance to say anything stupid and snarling and irrelevant, like Emily, who shouldn’t have asked you to come to this wedding?
, she launched into the sort of report that made her sound more like a doctor than anything she’d said since he met her.
And he tried to listen; he did. He heard her say that she had not, in fact, said anything disparaging about marriage to Emily, that Emily was feeling skittish about the move abroad, and about the shape the rest of her life would take.
He heard her say that Emily loved Michael, but that she was “nervous”—this word, Layla said pointedly, an I-told-you-so holdover from their aborted breakfast—and that she knew calling the wedding off was too extreme for today, but that she still felt tentative about whether she could get there by the end of the week.
He heard her say that Emily wanted to try focusing on time with Michael as much as she could.
But like a lot of times in his life where Griffin had listened to doctors talking to him, his mind was more than half on something else entirely.
Usually, it was his pain—the sort of pain that made words seem meaningless to his ears, the sort that had him thinking he could feel individual particles of dust settling on his skin, the sort that somehow made him wish he’d never have to listen to anyone, anywhere, ever again.
Right now, though, he was thinking of how strangely she was holding herself as she talked: her shoulders set so deliberately parallel to the river, her neck stiff like she couldn’t turn it.
When that loose swoop of hair blew slightly across her cheek, strands catching across the lenses of her enormous sunglasses, she didn’t even lift a hand to brush it away.
Twice, people passed right behind her, too close for comfort, and if she clocked them, he couldn’t tell.
Before, when he’d been with her, what he hadn’t liked was the way it seemed as though she was seeing everything.
Now, she seemed as though she couldn’t see anything at all.
And he didn’t like that, either.
When exactly? he wanted to ask. When exactly did you come here with him?
But that question didn’t have anything to do with Michael, so he tried to think of a Daytime Griffin question. A polite question.
“So, what? We all…wait around until she decides?”
For the first time since she started speaking, she moved: crossing her arms over her chest, cocking a hip one way while her head tilted to the other. A posture of such evident annoyance that he knew he hadn’t managed anything approaching politeness.
“We support them until she decides.”
I’m not supporting anyone but Michael, he thought.
“We’re the only two people who are going to know,” she added. “That things are still…tentative.”
He stared at her through his own sunglasses, watched as she shifted again. Tightening the arms she’d crossed, repositioning her feet. In his own body, he felt familiar, echoey pains, which he tried to ignore.
“She’s not telling her family?” he said.
Her throat bobbed in what looked like an uncomfortable swallow at that last word.
“No,” she finally said, and then—as if to divert him, she added quickly, “You can’t tell anyone in Michael’s family, either.”
Before he could stop it, his face contorted—the unsightly twist he knew it made on the rare occasions he almost laughed.
One minute of meeting Michael’s parents with Griffin in the room and Layla would find out that there was no risk of them hearing anything at all from him.
They could barely look in his direction, let alone talk to him.
The little bit of the eyebrows he could see on her face disappeared as she lowered them, and when her lips parted as if to speak, he preempted her.
“I won’t say anything.”
He hoped it came out with the finality he intended. He did not want to talk about Fitz and Paula. They wouldn’t be here until tomorrow, and for Griffin, that was a temporary source of relief.
“Good,” she said, with a quick nod, a little doctor-getting-ready-to-leave-the-room nod that he knew very well, and for the first time in all the times of seeing that stupid nod, he didn’t feel as though he was about to get a reprieve.
He may not want to talk about Michael’s parents, but also, he did not want her to leave yet.
Because of the promise you made, he told himself firmly. Because you still haven’t worked out how to fix this for Michael.
“Support them how?” he blurted.
She uncrossed her arms then, lifting a hand to reposition the strap of her bag. He thought, for a second, that she might finally look around—turn her head one way or the other, remind herself that they weren’t in a hospital room, the cabin of an airplane, an elevator, a hotel hallway.
Instead, he watched her shoulders lift slightly, a tiny intake of air he thought she didn’t want him to see.
“Just—you know. Show up to the wedding stuff. Be there for them. Act normal.”
It wasn’t much of a plan, and he knew—he knew—that’s what he should be focused on. There should be some strategy, some timeline for it all—a way to give Michael and Emily more time alone, a firm answer by a particular day, something.
But Griffin was long out of practice at making plans like that, and anyway, he still couldn’t stop thinking about how still and shut-off she was being: a woman he’d first seen in motion, a woman he’d watched take in every single detail about a scared girl on a plane.
“Is this how you act when you’re being normal?” he said.
“Is it for you?” she snapped back, and for a few seconds, neither of them said anything.
But he was thinking: a hundred answers, all at once, flooding his brain.
Normally, I don’t travel. Normally, I don’t go out much during the daytime, not where there’s a lot of people around.
Normally, I only eat food I’ve cooked for myself.
Normally, I only see Michael when it’s just me and him.
Normally, I lie in my bed on a set schedule, even if I don’t sleep.
Normally, I don’t see anything that looks as soft as that swoop of your hair—
“No,” she said, barely audible, and for a second he wondered if he’d imagined it—conjured a little light scolding for himself for thinking such a stupid thought about her hair.
But no—she had said it, and after a brief pause, she added, almost as if he weren’t there, “This is not how I act.”
Then, she finally did it: She turned her head.
Looked to the left, westward, toward the river’s long unrolling through this city, toward all the things people came here to see.
Her chest lifted again, a bigger breath this time, enough to smell the mossy dampness that came off the stone lining the water, the smoke that trailed at least every tenth pedestrian.
She didn’t turn her face back to him.
She said, with a finality more dismissive than any doctor’s nod, “I’ll see you tonight.”
And after she walked away, it was long minutes before he finally realized: He still hadn’t gotten her number.