Chapter Thirty-One
She caught up to him on her first try, no backtracking necessary.
Around a curve, a half block until the hotel, and the streets of the Marais were still quiet, so it sounded extra loud when she called out to him, the black line of his body hunched in such a specific way, a leave me alone way.
But he did stop when he heard her.
He turned and looked at her across the expanse of street, and she thought, Don’t leave. If you leave now, like this, that’ll be the end of it with us.
She knew that deep down.
A knowing more certain, maybe, from having just ended it—really, truly, ended what was left of it—with Jamie.
Griffin started walking toward her.
They met in the middle, in the center of the narrow street, neither of them, apparently, worried about traffic passing through.
On either side of them, the stone sidewalks were lined with those hip-height, painted-black guard stones, a relic from another time, like the buildings that rose up to enclose them—cream and tan and gray-white with age, the most gorgeous, showy neutrality.
Above were balconies, trailing ivies, lanterns spaced evenly and hanging elegantly from black wrought iron brackets, and, at the very, very top of it all, a curving river of bright blue morning light.
She thought, This would be the place. This would be the place to tell someone you love them.
Paris. Je t’aime.
No translation needed.
But something else she knew deep down was that she would not be telling him that today.
Not in any language.
And she knew that he would not be telling her, either.
“He wasn’t right,” she said, which—what with Je t’aime on her mind—certainly felt too blunt for this perfect, poetic street. But it was still important, so she kept going. “What Fitz said. He was not right.”
You do not burn everything to the ground, part of her wanted to say, but she could not bring herself to voice even a contradictory echo of Fitz’s vitriol. Could not bring herself to say burn in Griffin’s presence.
He was looking at her with such brutal, bleak sadness: his gaze moving over her face as if he was memorizing her, his mouth set as if it helped him concentrate.
It was so overwhelming that she dropped her eyes, desperate to think of something, anything to say that would make him forget about all the ugliness Fitz had aimed his way.
Because that ugliness, she suspected, was about to suck every scrap of beauty out of what she and Griffin had found here together in Paris.
“I know that,” he said finally, surprising her, and she snapped her eyes up to his.
She probably looked ten kinds of hopeful. Too hopeful. And she thought, maybe—maybe—she saw a ghost of that Versailles quirk.
“I think I’m more family to Michael than Fitz has maybe ever been,” he added.
“I think so, too,” she said, surprised to hear tears gathering in her voice. Relief and pride and happiness for him. Too much t’aime for her to acknowledge.
But if he knew this—if he knew that it had been good to tell Emily, that he had done right by Michael, that he was in fact more family than Fitz ever was, then maybe, for the two of them—for Griff and Layla, Layla who needed someone who understood family in exactly this way, there was a chance. A chance for them to—
“Your ex-husband,” Griffin said, and the ghost of that quirk was gone. The bleakness back.
“He’s fine,” she blurted, thinking of that funny little wheeze, that still-shocked look on his face as she’d turned to leave.
“I figured,” Griffin said. “I didn’t hit him that hard, despite his carrying on.”
“You didn’t have to, you know. Hit him. It doesn’t bother me, that she’s pregnant.”
He shrugged, looked toward the curve of the street, his gaze distant. She wondered if he even realized that he had the left side of his face facing her. He hardly ever did that, before.
“I figured that, too. I lost my head for a second.”
It was so quiet, so preternaturally quiet. As though all of Paris had slept in. Or as though all of its residents were sitting inside and waiting for whatever was next, the same way Layla was, even as she stood outside, so exposed.
“Your ex-husband,” he said again, and she almost rolled her eyes. She almost said, How many ways do I have to tell you? I am not worried about him, but then he looked back at her, and she realized that, when he’d said this before, he hadn’t really been asking for a status report on the man’s face.
It’d only been the beginning of a sentence. The beginning of something bleaker.
“He said something to me yesterday.”
“Griffin, he doesn’t—”
“He said you deserve someone good. Someone reliable.”
She swallowed. Dread and frustration and anger gathering within her anew. If she’d stayed behind to shut the door on Jamie, only to have Griffin open it again, she thought she might scream.
“I hope you are not about to tell me what I deserve,” she said. “I hope you do not think I’m incapable of determining that for myself. Not after everything I’ve told you about how I got here. How I knew what I didn’t want for my life.”
Something flickered in his expression, chasing away the bleakness for a split second, buoying her with a too-transitory hope.
He shoved his hands deeper in his pockets, shook his head. “I’m not about to tell you that,” he said. “I think you do deserve those things. But your choices are yours.”
They are, she thought mulishly. And I’d choose you, if you’d let me.
But he wouldn’t. She knew he wouldn’t.
“There’s something that guy and I have in common,” he said, and she had to admire how he still, even after punching him in the actual face, would not say Jamie’s name out loud. “Beyond having ideas about what you deserve.”
She didn’t answer. She was too stymied, her brain searching fruitlessly for comparisons between Jamie and Griffin.
She could not think of a single one.
“I don’t think either of us are good. I don’t think either of us are reliable.”
“That isn’t tr—”
“But here’s the difference between me and him, Layla.
I know it. I know I’ve got a half dozen problems I’ve never bothered to deal with, because all I’ve been doing is worrying about how bad I hurt.
And I know I can’t be counted on to fix them.
I know that next week I could have a bad day, ten times worse than what you saw last night, and all I’d do is start thinking again about whether I could somehow get the gates of hell to open up for good this time.
To keep me in and never let me out again, until I got so used to it that it would feel like the only forever I’d ever get. I know it.”
Something inside her shook to hear that: get the gates of hell to open up for good this time.
She knew what he was saying without him having to say it so plainly.
That the worst of his pain had included thoughts like this, however passing, and she knew that wasn’t good, though she supposed she meant the word differently than he did, or differently than Jamie did, with his someone good bullshit.
She meant that it was not okay for Griff to feel that way.
But she didn’t have time to explain that, because Griff was in it now, and if there was any hope to be found in this path they were on, it was that he didn’t look quite so bleak anymore.
He looked more like the man she’d first seen on the plane—taut and determined—mixed with the man who’d once dragged her down the Boulevard Saint-Germain to kiss her.
“That guy you were married to—it wasn’t good, what he did to you.
The position he put you in, the way he said family and meant something other than what he promised you the day you got married.
That wasn’t fucking reliable, making those vows to you and deciding that changing his mind was enough of a reason to stop honoring them. And I won’t do that to you. I won’t.”
That last part, he said as though he was convincing himself, and she thought, at first, that maybe what he was looking for was for her to help—for her to step in and do the convincing.
And she almost did. She almost opened her mouth and said, Of course you won’t. She almost soothed him, made herself a sort of sacrifice to him. Not in the same way she had with Jamie—not saying, Of course we can stay friends or Of course there’s nothing to forgive.
Still, she almost said to Griffin that she believed him, when she couldn’t be sure that she did.
When she couldn’t be sure he believed himself yet.
And she thought—she decided—that she would never make that mistake again.
So she didn’t say anything. She stood there and felt her eyes well up with tears she knew would fall.
His throat worked as he stepped closer. He took her hand, but in a particular way—the same way he had by the Seine. A slow, careful braiding, step by careful step until they were folded into each other.
She did the same thing she had that night.
Waited until he got close enough, then rested her forehead against his chest.
This time, what she felt there was only his burning, breaking heart.
This time, she thought she could soak it in her tears.
He spoke to her in a low voice, low like it was when they were in bed, but stripped of eroticism. A private voice.
“I don’t ever want to see you burned to the ground because of me. Out in the world on your own, trying to build yourself back up with your plans and your nice smiles and your never staying mad at anyone.”
They were dangerously close to him deciding for her territory again, him deciding what she did and didn’t deserve.
But only close, not quite there, at least not for her, because she was thinking about that phrase: Out in the world on your own.
She was turning it over in her mind, thinking of all the ways after her divorce that she’d made herself more alone.
Those choices, she knew, were hers alone to own, not Jamie’s: taking the new job, moving all the time, not staying close to Cara, not trying anything new, not doing anything but working, all because it felt to her like…