The First Husband

I smiled. “I was leaving London anyway,” I said. “I was leaving before all of this.”

“Why was that?” he asked.

“It was a dream job,” I said, giving him a small shrug. “But it turns out that you were right. It was someone else’s dream.”

Griffin nodded. But he stayed quiet, watching me, and waiting for the rest of it—waiting to hear where I was planning to go.

“But, the thing is, when your brother called, I was actually calling Nick to tell him that,” I said. I took a deep breath, and shored myself up to say the rest of it. “When your brother called, that’s what I was doing. I figured out what I wanted, and I was calling Nick to tell him.”

“Tell him?” Griffin said.

“Maybe I should go back to the beginning. . . .”

Griffin squeezed my hand, laughing a little. “Now,” he said. “Now she wants to go back to the beginning.”

“I had to go to London, Griffin. Because I didn’t know it before then,” I said. “I didn’t know the whole story yet.”

“Which is what?” he said.

“Why I picked you.”

I paused, meeting his eyes, so he could feel it. That I meant it, exactly what was coming.

“It wasn’t on a whim. My whole life I’ve been searching for things that felt good enough. Looking out there, as far out there as I could get, for what might make me happy. I even managed to make a career out it. But then I found you. And you were only interested in me feeling good enough for me.” I paused, trying to fight the tears in my eyes. “And you made me a restaurant so I would.”

Griffin gave me a smile, and then he tried unsuccessfully to pull me toward him, through the chair. “I think you should come here,” he said.

I nodded, and got into bed beside him, lying down on my side, the two of us facing each other, like that.

He kissed me on the forehead, then on both cheeks. “So . . .” Griffin said. “What about Nick, then?”

I tried to figure out how to say it, what I had figured out about Nick—what had taken me five years, a brutal breakup, and a belated marriage proposal to figure out: we loved each other. (I can be a slow learner, I know.) We loved each other in the difficult, unusable way where you took turns doing it, instead of ever managing to do it at the same time. You can’t always do it at the same time, but you have to be able to sometimes. Because, ultimately, wasn’t being good at it, together, the most important part?

And more than that, there was this. On the other side of Nick, I had shifted. Griffin had shifted me. That was what love could do, after all. And I didn’t want to shift back to where I accepted less than what was at stake for me, right here, with Griffin. A place where I had to show up. Where I was learning how to let someone show up for me.

Griffin tilted his head toward me. “I’m just asking,” he said, “if you realized all this in London, why did you call him?”

“Oh,” I said, and nodded, vigorously, getting his question. “Because I realized something else too.”

“What’s that?” Griffin said.

“I want my dog back,” I said.

I felt it against my chest, Griffin starting to smile, moving in to kiss me like that, smile still going. We kissed for a minute. And then he started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” I said, but then I was laughing too—just at the sound of hearing his laugh—both of us laughing hard, I was a little afraid it might hurt him.

“I was hoping to get her before I got on the plane to come to you,” I said. “But that didn’t exactly work out.”

“It’s not that,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s really not what I was laughing about.”

“What, then?”

“Jesse and I were looking out the window earlier,” he said. “When you were talking to my mother and Gia.”

My eyes got wide, understanding. “You saw the hug?” I said.

“I saw the hug, I even got it on film,” he said.