The Paris Match

Chapter Twenty-Five #2

Layla shrugged, unbothered. That was no big reveal. After all, she’d explained this to Griffin yesterday—what being a MacKenzie had meant to her. What it had felt like, to finally feel part of a family, and why it had felt like a failure to need distance from them after the divorce.

Why it had been so important to her, to be here this week for Emily.

“I may have—I may have had a reaction to that,” Griffin said.

“You may have?”

He lifted his left hand and took off his cap, shoving his right hand through his hair before putting it back on. Lower this time.

“I said that if he was your family, he wouldn’t have left you.”

Layla swallowed. Every bubble in her body went flat.

“And he said?” she asked, but she knew. She knew what she was about to hear.

He did not want to say it. She could tell, he did not want to say it.

So he rushed it out. “He said if you wanted family, you wouldn’t have left him.”

In all the months it had taken for Layla and Jamie to split—to really, committedly call it quits—she had never once felt truly betrayed by him.

She felt that he’d changed, and that he’d hurt her in the changing.

She had told Cara, over a lunch where she didn’t cry even once, that she and Jamie both had come to think of their vows as more metaphorical than literal.

That til death do us part only meant that they had an obligation to stay connected. To be there for each other.

Cara hated that.

But this—this thing that Jamie said. It was a betrayal. A violation, a vow-breaking. He may have kept it vague, but to Layla, it was not vague enough. It was not honoring the promise that Jamie, after all, had been the one to suggest.

That they keep it true, but unspecific.

We grew apart. We had different priorities. We wanted different things.

She could not help but think that him telling Griffin—the first man Jamie had seen her with since they split—was somehow the worst part of all.

So she sat up straighter in her chair, and for the first time, she said it to someone plainly.

Proudly.

“We got a divorce because I don’t want children.”

* * *

It was easy to tell him.

Shockingly easy, after so long of not really telling anyone, or of always protecting Jamie—protecting what they’d had for so long—in whatever telling.

It hadn’t ever been a secret, before the divorce, that Layla did not want children.

Any woman who felt the way she did knew that you didn’t really get away with not talking about it, whether you wanted to or not.

People would casually say things like, When you have one of your own or You don’t really know sleep deprivation until or The best timing in terms of your career is.

People would say, You would be such a good mom or Of course you could afford a great day care.

And when they did, you could maybe smile politely and say nothing.

Or you could say, Oh, that’s not really in the cards for me, but then sometimes there would be these looks—pitying looks, looks like you meant that you wanted to and couldn’t, looks that preceded something whispered and well-meaning like My niece did IVF or Have you ever considered adoption?

So, you would eventually say the truth of it.

Actually, I don’t want to have children, you would say, and then a lot of times you would have someone tell you that you would change your mind, or that losing your own mother must’ve been traumatic for you, Have you seen anyone about that?

or that you would regret it, eventually, or—everyone’s seeming favorite, a cutting last resort to kick up your existential dread—that you would not have anyone to care for you when you were old.

Layla had long felt that she’d gotten very good at those particular types of conversations.

But since the divorce, this certainty of hers—this thing she had never once doubted about herself, not in all the years since she was capable of really thinking about it—became shrouded by the painful memories she carried with her about the way it all fell apart with Jamie.

And it felt so good to finally tell someone.

To tell Griffin.

“He’d always said the same,” she told him. “Since we first met in college, he’d said the same. What we wanted out of life—our work, our hopes for traveling, the way we felt about the future, the lifestyle we wanted—we didn’t want to bring kids into that. We felt the same.”

She told him, too, that she never took it for granted. That she had always felt this pressure, this obligation, to make sure he was truly certain. It must have been hundreds of times, she asked him. When they were dating, on the day they got engaged. All the way up to the wedding.

And Jamie had always reassured her.

He was certain, too.

But then he wasn’t so certain anymore.

It started slow, but not so slow that it hadn’t made her feel dread right from the start.

A birthday party for one of her attendings, where Layla had helped out a fellow resident for maybe a grand total of half a minute by holding their three-month-old, and how Jamie had said, on the way home, that it “surprised” him to see it. To feel “some kind of way” about it.

A holiday card sent by a friend from college, a collage of photos featuring a three- and five-year-old, and Jamie’s wistful, They are cute, aren’t they?

Then, more serious moments. Sometimes I do think about it. Lately, I wonder what a kid of ours would be like. Don’t you think we could make it work? Don’t you think for us, it’d be different? What if we agreed to a timeline for revisiting it? What about when you’ve had five years as an attending?

Eventually, it became crushing: a vise around her middle, tightening and tightening as it was increasingly clear that Jamie had become certain about something else.

Counseling, which she agreed to, even though it was evident from the start that Jamie saw it as counseling for her, that Jamie had somehow become one of those people who thought Layla’s decision must have a deeper seed, a motherless child who could not imagine herself as a mother.

Special “date nights” that felt weighted with expectation, never more than when Jamie once said, What if we leave it in the hands of the universe?

and she’d thought, We’re the universe, remember? We make our own gravity.

But instead, she’d said, I’m not taking out my fucking IUD, Jamie, and it had been that—that moment of pure, undiluted frustration, so rare from her—that had seemed to spell the end of it.

So, finally, it was softer, quieter conversations.

Tearful ones, brokenhearted ones, heavy with their long history together, all the ways their lives were intertwined.

Jamie would sometimes say, It doesn’t matter; I’ll get over it; I love you and I love our life, but Layla knew he was lying to himself.

She knew that part of him was waiting—would always be waiting, until it was too late—for her to say that she’d changed her mind.

“But I won’t,” she said now to Griffin, who sat across from her almost perfectly still, a statue, a shade from the underworld readying himself to throw open the gates, to shove a new sinner through the fiery doors.

She knew that she was not that sinner, and it felt so good.

“Remember yesterday?” she said, watching as the hellfire in his eyes immediately banked, transforming into something else—warm with memory. “When I said what it had been like for me to come to Paris the first time?”

He nodded. At some point, he’d taken off his hat, tucking it behind him on the chair to make room for the food they’d eventually ordered.

A few minutes ago, a new pair of people had taken seats at the table beside them, and Layla had noticed—in her periphery—the way one of the men stared openly at Griffin’s profile.

She wanted to hiss at him. Like a little hell-creature.

But Griffin hadn’t seemed to notice at all.

“You said you were trying to become someone,” he said.

She nodded, too, pressing her lips together as though it would keep her from speaking this complicated thought too soon.

It’d been living inside her for a long, long time.

Since that first moment, that first It made me feel some kind of way, seeing you hold a baby.

It’d gathered speed and mass, like a rock rolling down a muddy hill, picking up dirt and moss and whatever else, faster and faster the heavier it became.

Every sly, and then direct, comment, every counseling session. Every conversation about ending it.

“I did become someone,” she finally said.

“For him, I did. When I met him, I was so in love with him—with who he was, and also…how he’d become who he was.

His traditions, his favorite things, his family who loved him so much, and I didn’t have many of those on my own.

I wanted so badly to have them, but I…I didn’t have many people to show me when I was young. ”

Griffin did something then—something she knew mattered, when it came to him.

He reached across the table, not pausing, not calculating, not worrying, and touched her. His right hand on her left wrist, curling his warm, strong fingers around her. He didn’t say anything at all.

“But I did have some things of my own, and this was one of them. This knowledge of myself, of what I didn’t want for my life, and never had wanted, the same way other people know that they do want it.

And I look back and think—this was my one thing.

My one thing I brought to that marriage that I couldn’t—that I wouldn’t let become something else.

I wouldn’t do it to myself, and I certainly wouldn’t do it to a kid. ”

He was stroking that soft, vulnerable skin on the inside of her wrist now, and it felt perfect. Comforting and courage-giving, so she could say this thing she’d never felt ready to say to anyone.

“And for all Jamie ever said to me about us being family, it feels funny. It feels funny that it only took one thing for us not to be one anymore.”

There, she thought, triumph moving through her—like one of those great, gold-winged horses they’d passed on the Pont Alexandre yesterday, rearing up in what looked to her like celebration. There, I finally said it.

We aren’t family anymore.

For her, it was a huge admission. A painful secret she’d hidden from herself, in the deepest, most broken parts of her heart.

She must have been quiet for a while, letting it sink in, because eventually she realized that Griffin had moved his hand again to take hers, intertwining their fingers on top of the table.

He said, “I fucking hate him.”

This time, she did laugh. A little release, a sip of bubbles popping deliciously inside her.

She shrugged and said, “I guess I hate him a little, too.”

At that, Griffin looked a bit like a gold-winged horse himself, which was maybe fair enough, but also, she didn’t want it to be too simple.

She was glad to have said all this, glad to have admitted it.

But the truth was, she knew that hating Jamie, even a little, was because she had loved him.

Because she had not wanted, ultimately, for him to live his life without something he had started to want so badly.

Not acknowledging that felt strangely like taking away something from herself.

A strength she had that no one truly seemed to understand.

Giving in to him—having a kid with him, even though she didn’t want to be a parent—that would have been weakness.

Saying no was strength.

“Him wanting kids—that’s okay,” she said. “I don’t dislike kids; I don’t dislike anyone else who wants them. I think he would be a good dad.”

Griffin snorted. “Except he’s a liar,” he said, and it was such a petty-sounding thing to say that she laughed again.

“I don’t think he lied. I think he changed his mind.” She shrugged. “Who wouldn’t want to be amicable about that?”

“Me,” Griffin said flatly. But his mouth quirked on one side, and for a minute, they sat together—holding hands across the table, Griffin having given up his post at the gates of hell for the time being, and Layla feeling lighter than she had in almost two years.

Eventually, though, she realized something—that the light had changed on the buildings around them, that the café crowd had thinned dramatically, that the rhythm of pedestrian traffic had changed.

She sat up straighter in her chair, pulling her hand away from Griffin’s.

She reached for her phone in her purse, then blew out a breath when she saw the time.

In less than three hours, the open house was starting.

The wedding well and truly on.

A different reality rushed back in. The spa this morning, that conversation with Emily. Everything Layla had learned—a house fire, how he got hurt, a friend who died—and how all of it was the actual risk to this wedding.

That is what she’d really come to this café to talk to Griffin about.

The secrets Michael was keeping from Emily.

She felt a pang of loss for how drastically she was about to change the tone.

“So, this morning, when I was with Emily,” she began, and she could see how his gaze immediately turned wary. Not quite like it was that first time he’d confronted her about this—something you said—but wary nonetheless.

“She’s still having doubts. About Michael. And I don’t think—”

“Layla,” he interrupted, and the way he said her name.

Low, like a plea, like sometime last night in the dark, with their skin pressed together, with his mouth close to hers.

“Y—yeah?” she managed.

“I know it matters. And you can tell me. But after everything you just said—I want a little more time where it’s not you worrying about this fucking family for once. I want you to leave Emily and Michael to themselves for a minute.”

She blinked at him, relieved and surprised, and also pulsing with arousal at how he’d said her name.

But it was the relief and surprise that were overwhelming her.

Relief because Griffin was right—at the moment, after everything she’d admitted about her and Jamie, after saying out loud that he wasn’t her family anymore—there was a new weight to what Emily was or wasn’t to her, a new weight to what had driven her to come all this way, and she wasn’t ready to think about it yet.

Surprise because in all the time she’d known Griffin, she’d known that Michael—Michael’s happiness, Michael getting married—was never far from his mind.

“Well, I—”

“One hour,” he said, but he was already pushing back from the table. Already holding out his hand. “Just give me one hour.”

“That’s longer than a minute,” she said.

He was standing now. Smiling down at her. He said, “I lied.”