Chapter Nine #2
Doing it like a dare was—to start, at least—shockingly easy.
Layla kept her own words in mind as she did the thing she’d been dreading and dreading and building up in her head for months: greeting her in-laws after a too-long stretch of avoiding them.
Watch me hug Manon tightly, watch me as I let her kiss both of my cheeks and then cup them after; watch me stand smiling as she wells up with tears and says she missed me.
Watch me lean into Robert’s side as he puts his arm around me; watch how I don’t overreact to him gruffly saying, “Hi, there, Laylapalooza,” an old inside joke that became a loving, fatherly nickname.
Watch me say hello to Manon’s sister Céline and immediately shower her with compliments on the chunky, over-the-top jewelry she’s wearing; watch how she takes the bait and tells me all about it instead of asking how I am.
Watch me greet Robert’s oldest friend and longtime business partner, and his wife, too; watch as I take a glass of wine from a tray and say how busy I’ve been, how glad I am to take some time off for this, how much I enjoyed my leisurely walk through the city today.
She was, to put it mildly, crushing it so far.
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Griffin hanging back, sticking close to the staircase, near one of the sleek high-top tables that dotted the deck, along with artfully arranged potted plants and white club chairs that were probably a total nightmare to keep clean.
If he was watching her, he didn’t make it obvious, but she pretended he was.
She pretended the skin over her knuckles wasn’t still faintly buzzy and warm from his touch.
“Has anyone heard from Jamie?” Manon’s musical voice called out, and Layla did not even stiffen where she stood with Céline and Rosie. She simply sipped her wine and held out a hand for the sweaty glass of something pink that Rosie was obviously trying to get rid of.
“Thank god for you,” Rosie said, handing it over, then immediately using her newly freed fingers to pick up one of the four lemon-rosemary gougères she’d stacked shamelessly onto her appetizer plate pretty much as soon as they’d been set out.
“No problem,” said Layla, not really because it was necessary to say but because—with Manon’s question lingering in the air—she didn’t want to seem as though she’d been rendered uncomfortably silent.
Maybe she couldn’t tell for sure if Griffin was watching her, but right this second, she could tell that Céline was.
“He says they’re almost here,” Robert answered before tucking his phone into his pocket, turning back to the conversation he’d been having with Abram, the friend and business partner with whom—Layla knew by Manon’s ensuing eye roll—he was almost certainly discussing business.
“Well!” Manon said, clasping her hands together. “They better hurry; we’re launching soon!”
Céline cleared her throat gently.
“How will that be for you, Layla?” she said.
Of all the MacKenzie-associated guests on this boat, Layla probably knew Jamie and Emily’s aunt Céline the least well, though having met her when she was still just Jamie’s girlfriend, well over a decade ago now, it wasn’t as though their acquaintance was casual.
She’d spent multiple holidays with Céline at the family table, had once spent two nights sleeping on a pull-out sofa with Jamie in Céline’s small Manhattan apartment so they could go see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade (“Banal,” Céline had proclaimed, but she’d still trudged out into the damp November cold with them like a chaperone, even though she and Jamie were twenty-two at the time).
When Layla and Jamie separated, Céline didn’t call, but she did send Layla a short email: I’m sorry to hear about you and my nephew.
You were a beautiful couple, and I wish you the best of luck.
So Layla knew her well enough to know that she could have anticipated such a direct question—Céline was blunt and at times impatient, similar in looks to Manon but completely different in personality.
Rosie closed-mouth coughed, a crumb of choux pastry escaping from behind the hand she put in front of her mouth.
“Oh, fine,” Layla said, wishing now that she wasn’t holding both her own drink and Rosie’s. One could not really casually wave a dismissive hand in the air under such circumstances, so she started to add, “You know, it was completely ami—”
But she cut herself off when she saw, out of the corner of her eye, Griffin doing exactly what she’d dared him to do. His eyes on her like hot coals, pressed straight to her middle. Not like this, she wanted to shout across the deck at him. Don’t watch me like this.
She stumbled her way into what sounded, even to her own ears, like a complete lie: “I’m excited to see him.”
One of Céline’s huge, long earrings got longer as she tipped her head. Layla felt a faint bloom of sweat beneath her breasts, either from Griffin’s hot-coal gaze or Céline’s obvious curiosity.
Rosie said, her shoulders sagging, her mouth still at least partially full, “I don’t really like these, actually. Does anyone want the other three?”
Layla handed Rosie her pink drink and thought seriously about taking the plate and shoving every single one of those gougères into her own mouth, if only to give Céline something else awkward to focus on.
Why had she said excited?
But right as she reached a hand out, she heard Emily’s voice, a single word, one of those sharp exhalations of frustration that was meant to come out quiet, but that somehow carried.
“Mom.”
Layla straightened, her eyes going to to where Manon and Emily stood by one of the boat’s railings, closer to where the long dinner table, gorgeously set for a dozen, waited under a canopy of string lights.
Already, Manon was speaking back to Emily quietly, leaning in, and Emily had a mulish expression on her face, her thumb bent beneath her first two fingers to rub absently—irritatedly, Layla thought—at the engagement ring on her third.
Quickly, Layla scanned the rest of the sparsely populated deck.
Abram and Robert were oblivious, probably talking about brokered CD rates or some other deathly boring financial topic.
Abram’s wife, Damaris—a relentlessly enthusiastic conversationalist when in any sort of company, probably because she was so grateful not to be talking about brokered CD rates—had cornered Michael near a potted plant, talking animatedly while he stared miserably at Emily.
And Griffin stared at Layla, now with his full Fix it face on.
“If you’ll excuse me,” Layla said, not bothering to risk another glance at Céline. Rosie, Layla could tell, was busy sucking down whatever was in her newly returned glass.
She tried to make her approach seem like a glide, a harmless stop-by only to say hello, another guest keeping the company mingling. But when she was a step or two away, Em’s eyes darted to hers and then back to Manon’s, a quick and sharp mother-daughter understanding passing between them.
When, a split second later, Manon turned to where Layla now stood, her smile was over-wide and guilty.
Oh god, Layla thought. They were talking about me.
“Layla,” Manon said, in a real of course we weren’t talking about you! voice, “did I say how well that dress suits you? It’s lovely, really.”
Before Layla could answer (“The dress is dead boring, Manon!”), Emily took a step forward and looped her arm through Layla’s elbow, linking them close.
“Layla,” Em echoed, but she kept her eyes fixed—a little icily, frankly—on Manon’s. “My mom was just telling me that Jamie and Samantha were looking into staying in a different hotel while we’re all here.”
Manon made a noise Layla had heard before: a laugh that was not really a laugh.
The kind of noise you make, for example, when one of your husband’s drunk work colleagues knocks over the entire bowl of the special cinnamon-spice punch you make every year for your annual holiday party, or when your neighbor’s goldendoodle digs up all the newly planted petunias in your yard.
“Oh no, it’s not really that, it’s—” Manon began.
“And I said that was fine,” Emily interrupted. “If that’s what they want to do.”
Layla watched as Manon gallantly fought a full grimace.
But Layla had been there for the party where the punch bowl tipped over, onto newly refinished hardwood floors, and she’d been there for that one summer weekend when two hundred fifty dollars of petunias laid, irreparably wilted, across a hot front walkway.
So she still caught the slight twitch at the corners of Manon’s eyes, the wobble in her smile.
“Oh,” Layla managed. Her and Emily’s pressed-together arm skin already felt over-warm and damp. If Layla did not already have an inkling—more than an inkling—of what was going on here, Emily’s bow-tight posture of obvious frustration would have given it away.
“You know how Jamie is,” Manon said, and then turned a soft gaze toward Layla. “He’s so tenderhearted; he doesn’t want you—”
“She’s not switching hotels, Mom,” Emily snapped. “If he wants to move, he can.”
“Darling, of course she doesn’t have to switch hotels,” Manon said, as if Emily was being ridiculous.
As if she wasn’t the one who—judging by Emily’s sweaty elbow pit tightening on Layla’s bicep—had suggested it only a moment ago. As if she wasn’t leaving a too-long pause, hoping Layla might go ahead and offer.
But Layla was frozen. Yesterday, crammed into her airplane seat and staring at poor translations of cheerful platitudes, she would have probably been stung but ultimately grateful for a nudge like this—a reason to keep on keeping what distance she could during this event, but this time, at someone else’s prompting.
Now, though, with Emily plastered to her side—with the memory of Emily crying and saying, about every other person on this boat, it’s not the same as you—keeping her distance would at best mean breaking a promise.
At worst, it could mean breaking up this whole entire wedding.
Her brain was whirring through various stalling, noncommittal responses when Emily spoke again.
“I need Layla with me.” Her voice had gone worryingly high, and Manon’s eyes widened.
For the first time since she’d gotten here, Layla automatically, inexplicably, thought in French.
Non, non, non.
“I need—” Emily said again, but this time, that high pitch in her voice broke.
It sounded ominously like the start to more crying.
And then, to Layla’s horror, everything seemed to happen all at once, or at least in such quick succession that there was no time to count the seconds. It was simply a half dozen things that each earned their own special non inside Layla’s head.
Manon, looking between her and Emily and saying, “Is something going on?”
A uniformed employee ringing an overloud bell, the five-minute warning to the boat’s launch.
Robert, cluelessly yelling out his intention to “call my son again before this thing leaves without him!”
Michael, showing up to Emily’s other side, looking like a man who fully expected to get broken up with in the next five minutes.
Griffin, appearing behind Layla, bad enough on its own, but then impossibly worse when he set his hand—god damn his electric hand—on her arm, curling that rogue thumb over her bicep, leaning in close, way too close, to say, “Can I borrow you?” in a way that sent pinpricks of heat through her.
She moved—an awkward step away from Emily, their arms still attached at first, and then a slight stumble from them both: Michael there to steady Emily, but Griffin only there to make Layla less stable, less in control of herself.
And then, finally: Jamie, Jamie’s dark blond hair and still-boyish smile appearing as he climbed the steps, more of him coming into view as he rushed his way up, pulling someone—Samantha, she was his new someone—behind him, his blue eyes scanning the deck and stopping on Layla’s.
Right as she tipped into Griffin Testa’s body.