Chapter Twenty-Three #2
“But it was more like, once Paula brought up Griffin, that got Fitz going—a couple asides about how Griffin has always been unreliable, how Michael would’ve been better off making his cousin Bryan the best man. Which is rude, I’m definitely not on Fitz’s side about that, but…”
“But what?”
It sounded sharper than Layla intended, though Em didn’t seem to notice.
“But honestly? Michael is so defensive about Griffin. And if I press him about it—god forbid I try to actually find out why my fiancé’s parents are so weird about the best friend he’s had since literal childhood—Michael gets quiet with me.
But shouldn’t I know? Shouldn’t I know what all this secrecy with Griffin is about? ”
Layla swallowed, the question—with a slightly different inflection—ringing through her ominously.
Shouldn’t I know?
Suddenly, the parts of her that had been so fully in charge for the last twenty-four hours—her overinvested heart, her disobedient body—seemed to quiet. Now, it was her brain turning back on, back up to full volume.
Shouldn’t I know?
“You…you don’t?” Layla said. She was already calling to her mind everything she had learned about Griffin yesterday: his absent dad, his ultrareligious grandparents who’d functionally abandoned his mother when she got pregnant at nineteen.
His lonely youngest years, his mom working multiple jobs, and then, moving to a new neighborhood and meeting Michael.
His good grades, a gifted program, a scholarship to Rensselaer.
His current house—“Small. Simple,” per his description—and how he could walk to the farm his mother lived on.
Her ranch home, her boyfriend named Peter who was a large-animal vet and who was only allowed—his mother’s rules, not so fully freed of her parents’ attitudes, as it turned out—to stay over twice a week.
His work and how he missed it, but how he couldn’t see himself going back to it full-time, not really.
Of course, she noticed what he hadn’t said. She noticed that there seemed to be a gap of several years he simply did not acknowledge to her. A big skip between those years after college, to now.
But yesterday, that had felt fine. Comforting, even. A signed permission slip for a field trip where she didn’t have to say a single word about her marriage, or her divorce.
Em shook her head, her lips pursed. “I know there was a house fire. I know that’s how he got hurt.”
Layla’s body was back in it now: her stomach clenching uncomfortably at this new knowledge—a house fire—combined with such an inadequate phrase for what had happened to Griffin as a result. It felt like breaking an unmade promise, to hear it this way.
A house fire.
He got hurt.
“And one of their friends from high school died during it,” Emily added. “Which is horrible.”
Layla blinked, unaccountably stunned. She shouldn’t be; she knew she shouldn’t be.
She had seen Griff’s body, had seen those scars up close, even had her fingers against more than one of them at various moments over the course of last night.
She knew you didn’t get scars like his without something catastrophic happening, something that could kill.
Thank god he didn’t die, she thought automatically, even as her heart twisted with the knowledge that he and Michael lost someone in such a tragic way.
Emily sighed gustily. “Last night when we got back from dinner, I tried to talk to him about it again, but it’s really the only thing he’ll shut down with me about.
He said that fire was the worst thing to ever happen to Griffin, and he deserves his privacy about it.
That I need to leave it alone. That’s what he said! Leave. It. Alone.”
Everything that had felt separate within Layla—heart, body, brain—now seemed to coalesce into a churning, strengthening whirlwind.
In the midst of it, she couldn’t grab on to any one thing: her forged-in-family concern for Emily, her brand-new protectiveness over Griffin, her own pressing but possibly inappropriate curiosity.
She wanted to know so much about Griffin—about all those years he hadn’t told her about. About the house fire, about whoever he lost, about everything after.
But also, should she even want to know?
Hadn’t she been the one to say that yesterday was temporary, that today would have to be back to normal, that after last night, it could only be about Michael and Emily from here on out?
After this week, she probably wouldn’t have reason to see Griffin Testa ever again.
Would she?
“I mean, do you think he should tell me?”
Emily’s whispered question was a reminder that Layla had, in the midst of her whirlwind, gone awkwardly silent. She inhaled, repeated Emily’s question back to herself silently to drown out all the other ones she wasn’t going to get answers to right now.
She had to answer this for Emily, and not make it about Griffin.
“I think he shouldn’t be putting you in situations where you’re in the dark,” Layla said.
“Griffin”—she hoped Em couldn’t hear the catch in her throat when she said his name—“deserves privacy, of course. But also, when it comes to Michael, you shouldn’t have to feel like you’re walking around land mines you don’t know the location of all the time. ”
“Yes!” Emily said, relief in her tone at being understood.
It came out loud enough that a few others looked over, so Layla smoothed her expression into a smile, made it look, she hoped, like she and Em were whispering over something like wedding night lingerie, or why men could never find the ketchup without help, even when it was always in the exact same place in the refrigerator.
Em lowered her voice again. “Remember when you came for Christmas the first time, and Jamie explained to you in the car on the way over why Dad and Uncle Steve don’t talk about Gramma MacKenzie? It’s like, that is what I want, you know? That’s marriage!”
Layla was thinking, Your dad and your Uncle Steve had a stupid fight over Gramma MacKenzie’s ugly dining room set. It wasn’t a house fire where someone died, Em.
But before she could find a better alternative for that bit of sharpness, Emily groaned and shook her head.
“Ugh,” she said. “Sorry to bring it up. After yesterday and everything.” She grabbed one of Layla’s hands, a look of soft apology—pity?—in her eyes. “How are you, Lay?”
It was a few seconds before Layla put the pieces of this together. The it Em was sorry for bringing up was Layla’s marriage. The After yesterday was about the museum, about Layla leaving under the weighted reminder of The Kiss, under the watchful gaze of her ex-husband. And probably everyone else.
“Oh,” she said, no That’s convenient! sense of things in sight now. She was either going to have to come clean about her day with Griffin—a terrible idea, given what they’d just been talking about—or continue to let everyone think she’d left yesterday because of Jamie.
“I’m really okay,” she added, trying to talk over the still-churning whirlwind.
I slept with Griffin and got my heart involved.
I’m sore all over this morning, because he explored my body so fully, so perfectly.
I want to get up and leave this spa; I want to go find him and ask him about the house fire, the friend he lost, the lazy judgments of people like Fitz and Paula, and maybe even you.
I want to know if he’d ever want to see me again, after all this.
“It was…you know.” She clutched for a word, any word, and landed on: “Memories.”
Em clucked in sympathy, a noise that made Layla shift in her seat with…well. More guilt, surely.
But also, maybe annoyance.
Not those memories, Layla wanted to clarify.
Not memories with your brother.
But she couldn’t very well go on explaining it. She couldn’t say, Actually, the memory that sent me out of that museum yesterday was with Griffin. A cozy dinner, a fight in the street, a kiss you could carve a sculpture of.
She couldn’t say, And then we made a bunch more. All day, all over the city. All night, in his bed.
So she squeezed Em’s hand back and said, “I’m good today. Promise.”
“Good.” Em took a breath, leaned back. “Because after these massages…”
Emily trailed off, looked toward where Manon and Céline sat, to where Paula and Damaris stayed huddled in conversation, to where Rosie and Sam had wandered farther down the spa’s cavernous hall, where the Turkish bath—the place they were all to regather after their treatments—was located.
Layla could tell Em was thinking about how this small group of guests was set to expand over the next few hours.
Most of them, Layla had already discerned, were from the bride’s side of things—Uncle Steve and his third wife, despite the dining room table theft, two of Manon and Céline’s French cousins and their spouses, coming in from Nantes, a couple more of Em’s close friends.
Tonight, they’d gather at the rental property nearby that Manon and Robert had booked for the next three days of formal events in honor of the bride and groom: cocktails and music this evening, an informal rehearsal tomorrow morning followed by tomorrow night’s ceremony, and brunch the morning after.
In other words, after these massages, this destination wedding became a lot less destination.
A lot more wedding.
And Emily still had that fretful, anxious look on her face.
“Can I do anything?” Layla asked.
Em blew out a breath, shoulders sagging. Across the room, one of the frosted-glass doors opened, and a tight-ponytailed woman all in white emerged, announcing readiness for “the MacKenzie party.”
Manon stood and said, “Enfin!” and Céline leaned in to chide her for the expression of impatience.
“Probably not,” Em answered, rising slowly and smoothing her robe. “Unless you can somehow teleport across this city to wherever the guys are, and make it so Griffin somehow doesn’t make anything worse today.”
For a few seconds, Layla stayed sitting—staring—as Em made her way toward Manon, trying to decide which part of this whirlwind waiting room had blown her off course the most.
Was it the reckoning with the depth of her feelings for Griffin, after only a single day and night spent alone with him, fully in his company?
Was it what she’d learned about him, and how he was hurt?
Was it this sharp, sudden feeling of frustration she had toward Emily—Emily, her family!—for saying his name in that uncharacteristically unkind way?
Or was it the slow, dawning realization that didn’t turn out to be much of a relief at all: that Layla—pitied, brokenhearted Layla, brave-facing it for the ex-in-laws in the city they’d claimed as their own, accidentally reminding the bride that marriage was not forever on the very first night she was here—was not, in fact, the biggest threat to this wedding happening?
She swallowed and stood, her legs wobbly, her mind racing.
Her heart somewhere across the city.
With the man who’d once accused her of ruining this whole week.
With the man whose secrets might have been just as responsible all along.