“’I wish the goblins would come and take you away, right now,’” I teased her. Then, I revised, “Wait. No. I wish the goblins would come and take me away, right now. You can’t appreciate what Bowie is packing.”
I managed to get her into her light cotton sleeper and a bib and carried her to the kitchen, where El-Mudad waited for us with plates of food.
“You’re going to eat this with us?” I asked incredulously.
“Is it poisoned?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Then, I think I’ll be fine.” As I buckled Olivia into her high chair, he added, “You know, you shouldn’t always think of me as some mysterious, sophisticated stranger.”
“I don’t think you’re a stranger.” That wasn’t entirely true. What little we knew about him outside of sex was largely superficial. “I do think you’re sophisticated and mysterious.”
“Is that an insult?” His laugh was rich and throaty.
It was also infectious. “It’s not meant to be.”
“You see yourself as wholly apart from this life,” he said. It wasn’t a denouncement but an observation. “It must be nice.”
“Nice?” I scoffed. “Yeah, it’s really nice. I have all this money, a giant house—seven giant houses, two of which I’ve never even seen before—and all I really want is my husband. And he’s like the one thing I can’t have.”
“It’s true, then, that money can’t buy happiness.”
“That’s just what conservatives say to make poor people feel bad about wanting to be rich.” The words were bitter in my mouth, but they were true. And the damn shame of it all was, money really couldn’t buy happiness. But it could buy people like Neil a better chance of recovery from stuff like this. “If we couldn’t afford a private treatment center, what would have happened to him?”
El-Mudad leaned forward, as though he would tell me a secret. “If you worry about what could have happened, how will you have energy to handle the things that have happened?”
“‘Fess up. You’re secretly a therapist.”
He chuckled and picked up his fork. “I went to a lot of trouble to microwave this. Don’t let it get cold.”
As we ate, me alternating my own bites between the ones I squished up for Olivia, we talked about more cheerful subjects, like a boutique hotel he was eyeing in Paris—“So, the girls won’t have to travel so far to visit their mother”—and how many undeserving actors, actresses, and shows had won awards lately for movies and television shows we’d hated. I told him what I knew about Neil’s foundation, though I hadn’t really cared much about it since it had opened. All I wanted to hear was that it was still operating appropriately, nothing had gone horribly wrong, and, then, to never set foot in that building again. It was too painful to remember that stupid phone call, the one that had started all of this.
“Do you think, due to circumstances…” El-Mudad began hesitantly.
I knew what he wanted to ask. “No. Neil loves the foundation. He worked too hard for it. It obviously hasn’t been on his mind for the past few months, but someday, it will be, again. And it’ll be good for him to have something. You know, to, like, live for?”
“He has much to live for,” El-Mudad said, reaching over to wipe a string of drool from Olivia’s chin with her bib.
Yeah, well, try being on this side of the table and tell me that, again. It wasn’t his fault. People always tried to say the “right” thing to be comforting, but there wasn’t any right way to comfort someone going through this.
After dinner, El-Mudad helped me put Olivia to bed. His magnetic charisma worked like a charm on babies, too. When he was in the room, she didn’t even see me. And, if she did, she didn’t look impressed. That’s how distracting his very presence was; everything else seemed bland by comparison.
The bedtime routine seemed to go a lot faster than it usually did, and I realized it was my nerves giving me that impression. I had no idea what he thought I expected from him tonight. I didn’t know what I expected, either.
We closed the door to Olivia’s room and stood in the hall, just looking at each other.
“Are we Emir and Chloe tonight?” I asked, swallowing the lump of anxiety in my throat. “Or are we ourselves?”
“It wasn’t something Neil and I discussed,” El-Mudad said, rubbing his stubbled jaw with one hand. “What do you need, Sophie?”
“I need…” I closed my eyes. Was it cheating on Neil if I said I needed to be myself? To be Sophie, the woman who hadn’t been intimate with another person in so long she didn’t know if she could, anymore? Or would he understand when I confessed to him? Because I would confess to him, no matter what occurred in his absence, and no matter what blanket permission he might grant in hindsight.
“Sophie,” I decided. “I just… I need someone to hold me. And to love me and just tell me…”
I looked down at my hands, and the tear drop that had run off my cheek to splash there.
“Sophie,” El-Mudad said quietly. I looked up, and his big brown eyes held nothing but sympathy and… “I love you.”