Chapter Thirty #2
Fitz stepped back, looked down at his wife. “Let’s not what, Paula? Make assumptions? Everyone saw him come in here last night—”
“Let’s—” she tried again, but Fitz was beyond hearing her, his face red now. Layla thought of Em in the spa yesterday, saying, that got Fitz going.
A mention of Griffin. That’s what got Fitz going.
And she could see it now. It going. She could see that this is what Griffin was waiting for, what he had turned into a statue for. Preparing himself, hardening himself.
“What did you say to her?” Fitz shouted, his anger ratcheting up with the knowledge that Griffin was not going to answer.
“Mr. Pl—” Layla began, cutting herself off as she realized she was not quite sure how to address him—Sergeant? Fitz, even though she didn’t know him?—but it didn’t matter. She definitely had not spoken loudly enough to interrupt this.
“I could’ve called this on Wednesday, that you would wreck this. I could’ve seen it from a hundred miles away, that if something went wrong for my son again—that if he lost someone again—I’d find you at the end of it. You!”
“Hey,” Layla said, still not loud enough.
“You have been a curse to Michael. A goddamned curse! Why he defends you at every turn, despite everything you took from him, I’ll never goddamn know, but if there’s one good thing that comes out of this, I hope it’s that he finally sees—”
“Hey!” Layla shouted now, and actually—actually, she had not only shouted.
She had also set her hand on Fitz’s shoulder.
And shoved him. Out of Griffin’s statue-still face.
“Layla,” someone said—she thought Robert, but honestly, it could have been Jamie, too. She was beyond caring. She was beyond anything remotely amicable in this situation.
She was mind under matter. A one-woman mob.
Fitz was staring down at her, shocked.
“That. Is. Enough. You obviously have no idea about who Griffin is, or possibly who your son is, so if you’ll—”
“Layla!” This time, the voice was Manon’s, unmistakable in its exclamation. A not-complimentary one. A not-welcoming one.
A scolding one.
She was so surprised she finally shifted her gaze away from red-faced Fitz. Manon was looking at her as though she was a stranger.
As though she’d never been family at all.
Robert cleared his throat. “Layla,” he repeated, his tone more soothing, but somehow still with that scolding note folded in. “We realize you’ve…well, it’s clear you’re having some kind of dalliance here—”
Griffin made a noise.
Low and warning. A statue creaking to life.
“Robert, come on,” she said quickly, her voice cutting through it.
She looked between him and Fitz, trying somehow to remind Robert who he really was, at least in all the years she’d known him.
He’d never been the sort of man to talk to someone like Fitz had just talked to Griffin.
He’d always hated that sort of dominance, that particular brand of toxicity.
But she couldn’t find that Robert now. Too upset by or worried for Emily, maybe, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that, in this moment, he seemed to think she was the toxic one.
Shockingly, it didn’t even hurt.
“Oh my god,” she muttered, and turned her attention back to Fitz. One more thing, and then they could go. “You need to talk to Michael,” she said. “Not Griffin. You don’t have anything to say to—”
She was interrupted by that gurgling squeak again, and then, a sound and movement she’d heard and seen once before on this trip. A chair being shoved back, a sudden standing.
And Sam, streaking past everyone, hand over her mouth.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” Manon shouted, even more scolding-sounding than she had been to Layla, clearly at the end of some kind of wedding-cancellation rope. “How many times is she going to do this?”
Unkind, Layla was thinking as she heard a door slam, but also, was she going to have to go in there and check on Sam again? Because—
“Mom,” Jamie snapped angrily, which was good, already a better showing than the boat deck, but actually he should probably save this for later and get over his weak-stomached fear long enough to follow Sam, who…
Oh, she thought, with dawning realization, at the same time Jamie yelled, exasperated-sounding, “She’s pregnant.”
Another round of noisy reaction. Rosie said, “I fucking knew it,” and Céline said, “Oh, Jamie,” like she was very disappointed in this whole thing.
Robert coughed and Manon started crying again, and they did not seem like happy tears.
Shockingly—or perhaps not—Paula was no longer holding on to Fitz’s elbow; she was clasping her hands at her chest and saying, “Aww,” as though she herself was about to be this child’s grandmother.
Layla felt something bubble up inside her, and at first, she thought it must be a bad sensation. It could only be a bad sensation, surely, upon figuring out that her ex-husband was about to have the baby that he’d broken his vows to her for.
But no. It was not, in fact, a bad sensation. It was a sparkling-water sensation, a fizzy desire to explode in hysterical, exhausted laughter.
Pregnant, of course!
She was well over halfway to doing it, to letting out that laugh, a not-very-amicable reaction to the news, but then, a lot happened all at once.
Fitz shoved again, out of the way.
A fast crossing of the room.
One punch, a chorus of shrieks and gasps.
Jamie on the floor, clutching his nose, howling dramatically.
A statue standing over him.
“What did I tell you?” boomed Fitz, seemingly directing that comment to everyone before turning back to the statue—to Griffin. “You can’t help but burn everything to the ground, can you? Can you?”
Layla wanted to intervene again. She wanted that impulse to shove, to shout back at Fitz, but it had momentarily abandoned her.
She could only look at Griffin, standing over Jamie, shock on his face, as though he could not remember how he’d gotten there, as though he could not remember throwing the punch.
But she could tell he’d heard.
You can’t help but burn everything to the ground.
“Griff,” she said, but she knew he wasn’t listening. He was probably hearing Fitz on a loop. Fresh salt in a wound that he had opened again—for her—only last night.
He kept his head down. He said, “I’m sorry,” to Jamie, even though Jamie was still making a lot of noise down there and probably didn’t hear. She couldn’t even see any blood. She thought he was probably fine. Actually, she thought he might be milking it, staving off any obligation to check on Sam.
“I’m sorry,” Griffin repeated, this time raising his head, both of his hands. “I’ll go.”
“No,” Layla said, at the same time Robert said, “That seems like the best idea,” and also at the same time Michael’s cousin said, “Wait, didn’t he pay for this wedding?”
Rosie heard that. She said, “Oh my god, he did?”
“Some of it,” Manon clarified, and Robert said, “Well,” in a corrective way.
A way that suggested it was more than some.
By now, it didn’t surprise Layla. It made sense: not because she knew about his money, but because she knew about him, and how much he loved Michael. He would do anything for Michael.
Pay for the wedding.
But also, break up the wedding.
“It doesn’t matter,” she thought he said, but there was no knife-edge in his voice now.
It was hard to hear him over another burst of chaos: the Nantes cousins arriving at some point in the last few seconds, adding to the flurry of shocked conversation with their fast, confused French, Robert kneeling to help Jamie up, Sam emerging from somewhere, gray-faced, Rosie rushing over to her with a glass of water.
Layla felt distant from it all, watching Griffin take in the scene as though he was looking at something else entirely, as though he was seeing some long-ago night come roaring back, hot and destructive and never-ending.
No, she thought. No, no, no.
He took a step back, and she followed.
Then, Manon practically shrieked her name, shocking her enough to turn away—a second of distraction that some part of her knew Griffin would use to his advantage.
“Can you check him?” Manon said, still shrieky, having joined Robert in flanking Jamie, who was still holding a hand over his nose, staring miserably at Layla. “What if his nose is broken?”
“It’s not,” Layla said flatly, which she supposed she could not really know for sure. She’d make her apologies to Hippocrates later.
Or maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she was fine breaking her vow to that guy, just this once.
Jamie had dropped his hand from his nose, finally, but still, Layla did not really look at the damage.
She said, “I’m going to go,” and then she turned, knowing already Griffin had beat her to it—that he was already out the door, alone in the Paris morning, but also alone somewhere else entirely, in the middle of a fiery spring night.
She barely looked at anyone as she strode back through the room, grabbing her purse up again and passing Rosie and Sam in the hallway.
“Carry alcohol wipes,” she said to Sam, because she could not help it—could not help feeling for this woman and the Paris crucible she’d been put through this week.
“Waft one under your nose when you feel sick.”
Sam may have murmured her thanks, but Layla was out the door, stepping into the street with a sinking feeling in her stomach at not being able to see Griffin straightaway.
She would find him; she would try to the right at first, and—
“Lay, wait!”
She groaned. Actually groaned: a not-calm, extremely bothered Arrrgh at being held up, in this moment, by him.
The husband who had—she could see it so clearly now—held her up for so long.
For a second, she thought of simply speeding up—of ignoring him, of running away, of refusing to give him even a second more of her time this morning.
But just as quickly, she rethought it.
She thought, This isn’t just about a second more of this morning.
This is about a second more of forever.
So, she stopped where she stood. Turned to face him: Jamie and his soft, light eyes that had welled with tears on their wedding day; Jamie and his safe, sweet handsomeness, even with a swollen, already bruised bridge of his nose; Jamie’s quick-to-smile mouth turned down in a pouting frown of sadness and disappointment and concern.
She had so truly loved him, once.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice cracking. “I’m sorry you found out that way about the baby. I didn’t mean for you—”
“Jamie,” she interrupted, and yes—yes, there it was, the blade in her voice, the one she’d learned over the last few days how to sharpen—“I do not care about the baby.”
He stared. Like Robert, like Manon. Stared like he didn’t know her at all.
And maybe he didn’t.
Not anymore.
“I hope the very best for you, and for Samantha, and for your baby. But it is none of my business anymore. It has not been my business for a long time, and I should’ve said that to you sooner.”
“Lay,” he said again, and she decided that she didn’t like that nickname. Did not like the diminutive, the way it chopped her almost in half, the way it flattened her. “Of course it’s your business. We said we would always be—”
“Family,” she finished for him, but in this bladelike version of her voice it was a new word. A severing, rather than a joining.
“Yeah,” he said. He sounded so small and lost and sad that a part of her—the part of her that had been in love with him once, that had planned a life with him once—ached for him, and despite everything, she was glad not to have lost that aching.
She was glad that this severing was leaving something behind in her.
Something that would hurt a little forever.
Sometimes, that was all you could keep from the things that happened to you.
“I lied,” she said, still sharp, because it was a kindness to keep it that way for him, too.
“Or I changed my mind, maybe. It doesn’t really matter which.
What matters is that I should’ve known that when we got divorced, we couldn’t be a family anymore.
Maybe someone else could do it, Jamie, but I can’t, and you know why I can’t.
You know what it meant to me to call you—to call your mom, your dad, your sister—family.
And that’s why you should’ve known that it wouldn’t work to change your mind about us.
To change your mind, and still get to keep me. ”
He made a noise—a scoff, maybe, but there was a weak, nasally whistle that accompanied it, the swelling doing its work.
“If this is about him—” he began, and Layla held up a hand, stopping him.
“This is about you, Jamie,” she said. “This is about your loss, and why it’s not my job to make it easier for you. Nicer, more amicable, whatever. We are divorced.”
He winced at the word, one she realized they had only ever said rarely to each other. Euphemisms, that’s what they’d preferred: I think it’s time or going our separate ways or even the somewhat-harsh splitting up.
But to her, it felt so good to say it: straight to his face, while they stood across from each other, a reverse ritual that maybe would have helped her on that day when she’d just scrawled her signature across a tab-tipped set of documents.
The restlessness was back in her now—the need to go, to find the man she’d actually come out here for. She looked at her ex-husband and heard his whistling nose and thought of all the ways the MacKenzies left in that apartment would talk about her today, once the dust settled.
Can you believe she—
I’ve never known her to—
That isn’t the Layla—
But there was no part of her that cared.
“Jamie,” she said, and waited until he met her eyes to speak again. “Get a stronger stomach, and go take care of your family.”
Then, she finally turned and ran.