Chapter Nineteen
“Honestly, I would.”
“Ro! Keep your voice down!”
Inside one of the many gorgeous, glossy parquet floor rooms of the Musée Rodin, Emily scolded her best friend gently, with a laugh in her voice—a light and welcome sound after the van ride over here, when Em had been reticent, obviously frustrated with Michael’s decision to go get Griffin if it meant separating from the group.
Since Layla had been at least partially responsible for that decision—not that Emily had noticed her quiet suggestion to Michael—she was grateful for Rosie’s relentless sense of good humor.
Especially because Layla didn’t feel like she had much to spare this morning.
“What’s it called?” Rosie said, moving to another side of the pedestal, looking for the sculpture’s placard. When she found it, her eyes widened delightedly. “Man! With! The! Broken! Nose!” she whisper-exclaimed.
“Oh my god,” Em said to Layla. “I know where she’s going with this.”
“This is Rodin predicting hockey romance book heroes,” Rosie said.
“There it is,” Emily muttered knowingly.
“Don’t act like you don’t read them!” Rosie turned to Layla. “Do you read them? I for one am deep in my fantasy era right now, sort of a more magical creatures instead of men situation, but if hockey sounds like something you’d be into, I have some rec—”
“I don’t,” said Layla, maybe too abruptly. Not because she would not, in fact, take a book recommendation from Rosie—honestly, at this point, she probably would’ve taken a piercing recommendation from Rosie—but because she did not want to think about romance.
In any context.
Layla watched as Emily’s eyes drifted ahead into the next room, where Fitz and Paula had advanced to.
Even after only a bit of time with them—the lobby, the van, the time they’d spent inside the museum so far—Layla had observed that Fitz treated sightseeing like he was going to be quizzed at the end.
He would bend to read the placards, barely looking at the art itself, his mouth moving as though he was committing it to memory.
Maybe in someone else she would find that endearing, but she was currently holding a grudge against this man she hardly knew.
On behalf of some other man that she also hardly knew.
You’re lying, a little voice nudged her. You do know him now. You know he has panic attacks and he tastes like chocolate soufflé. You know he hurts. You know he hated putting you in that car.
But she ignored it.
“How’d it go with them last night?” she said to Emily now, giving it her best big-sister voice, taking advantage of Rosie’s distraction (posing for a selfie beside Man with the Broken Nose).
“Really good,” said Emily. “It was a smaller group, because Damaris and Abram passed, and Jamie took Sam to the opera last night.”
Layla was very proud not to react at all to that. At the moment, she could not even really remember the night Jamie had taken her to the opera, all those years ago.
“And I know I already texted you this, but seriously, you taking Griffin to dinner was so good.”
Layla did react to that. A feigned plucking of a nonexistent piece of fuzz off the front of the stupid summer turtleneck she decided to wear today, which had the advantage of hiding the beard- burn she saw on her skin in the mirror this morning.
“It was no big deal,” Layla said, about what was possibly the biggest deal of her life in a very, very long time, and noted that it felt as bad to say it out loud as it had to text it last night from her bed, when Emily’s all-caps THANK YOU and string of heart emojis came through.
A few minutes later, Emily had sent a selfie of her and Michael, the huge, twinkle-lit Eiffel Tower in the distance behind them, both of them flushed and happy-looking. We’re out on our own now, talking and being together.
I’m so glad, she wrote back, but afterward, she’d closed her eyes until she could manage the pressure building there.
“I do not understand the deal between them,” said Emily now, keeping her voice low.
“Michael always says his parents kind of thought Griffin was a bad influence when they were growing up, but like, Mom and Dad know Rosie brought pot brownies to my sweet sixteen, and they’re over it.
” She shrugged. “Fitz is kind of inflexible, I guess.”
Layla’s eyes wandered back to the man—reading another placard, while Paula waited patiently beside him in an oversize T-shirt that said PARIS on it, like the whole city was an American university.
This was a choice that struck Layla as way more embarrassing than the fact that Rosie was now recording an Instagram Live over by the window.
“And Griffin is sort of a jerk,” Emily added.
For a split second, she wanted to say, I think it’s more than that; I think there’s something else there. I think whatever’s between Michael and Griffin and his parents, you might not know the whole story.
But saying that—she swallowed back a confusing feeling of being tugged in two directions, the middle line of her body stretching uncomfortably.
As a sister to Emily, maybe she should. Maybe she should say, Figure out what that’s about before the wedding.
If Michael can’t tell you everything, you can’t trust him to tell you anything.
But as a…friend to Griffin, maybe she shouldn’t say anything at all. Maybe she shouldn’t invite any more speculation on the things he apparently kept private.
The thought alone made her face prickle in remembered embarrassment—his rejection of her, her realization of what that rejection might have been about, him sending her away anyway.
He was sort of a jerk.
She didn’t owe him anything.
“I’m going to go catch up to them,” Emily said, preempting Layla from changing course, from resisting that tug in her middle and being the big sister again. “Paula looks bored.”
“Paula looks like she needs a jean jacket,” Rosie said as she slid back in beside them, linking arms with Layla. “It would match her T-shirt.”
Emily giggled. “Hush,” she said, and then walked away, catching up to Fitz and Paula as they disappeared from view.
Rosie tugged on Layla’s arm, moving them into the next room, as gorgeous as the last—its huge, arched windows casting sunlight over the pedestaled sculptures, the figure sketches hung on the walls.
“Okay, we’re alone now,” said Rosie. “Tell me everything.”
Layla blinked down at Rosie, briefly wondered what they must look like from the outside: Layla like a staid chaperone in this beige turtleneck, hair carefully straightened, makeup light other than the (probably) metric ton of concealer under her eyes; Rosie a wayward, charming charge in a top made out of crocheted squares, four small, unsecured braids peeking out randomly in her hair, a smoky eye that (probably) looked so good because it was left over from last night’s makeup.
“About?” Layla replied, chaperone-sounding, because she couldn’t be sure what Rosie was asking. Had she figured out that things between Emily and Michael were still on unsteady ground? Did she think Layla had some kind of intel on the situation between Michael’s parents and Griffin? Did—
Rosie shook Layla’s arm, letting out a frustrated groan before whispering, “Did you fuck the billionaire?”
“Oh my god,” Layla echoed Emily, nothing amusing about Rosie’s relentlessness now. Her face was blazing. “No! Absolutely not. Why would you even—”
Rosie laughed. “I’m teasing! Well, sort of. The truth is, you two on that train yesterday—pretty cozy! Or as cozy as that guy can look, I guess. He’s a bit remote!”
“We were looking at stuff about Versailles,” Layla said, feigning interest in a placard. Now she felt like the wayward charge.
“And not to be a creeper but I was definitely in the lobby when you came down last night. You didn’t see me because I was behind one of those big dumb columns! He looked at you like…” Rosie did not finish this sentence. Instead, she raised one of her hands and fanned her face.
Like what? she wanted to ask, but she said, “He isn’t a billionaire.”
Rosie ignored that. Layla had the feeling that Griffin being a billionaire was going to be part of an elaborate lore Rosie was writing about this entire week.
“So nothing happened? You didn’t get him drunk and then bang him into the worst hangover of his life, hence him not showing up this morning?”
Layla faked a laugh. She felt like laughing was the right response, the calm-and-in-control response, when the truth was, every joking, flippant thing Rosie said scraped over all of Layla’s sensitive spots.
Something had happened, including him making some asinine, deflecting comment about the wine he hadn’t drunk.
Something had happened, including her absolutely wanting to bang him beneath a doorway.
Something had happened to make him not show up this morning.
And in spite of everything, half of her mind had constantly been on whether he was okay.
“I didn’t have anything to do with it,” she said, and tried not to think of all the ways she’d touched him. Tried not to think about him backing away from her.
“Ugh, that’s disappointing. Although, I slept alone in our room last night, so someone is still getting it, right?”
Rosie waggled her eyebrows in the direction of Emily, one room ahead, now flanking Fitz on the other side as he read another placard like it was the only antidote in the world for having to speak to people in his current and future family unit.
For a few minutes, she and Rosie drifted together, arm in arm, weaving through pedestals and other museum patrons, and a few students with sketchbooks in their hands, concentrating on some lesser-known piece, or a small cast of something more famous.
Rosie kept the conversation going, funny and easy and something Layla should—and did—feel grateful for.