Page 46 of His Wall

The bread blurred a little in front of me.

I did not let it go further. I made my breathing go where it was supposed to go. I picked up my own wine. I took a drink. I set it down, and I did not look at him.

"Eat, Rafael."

"Okay."

We ate. The waiter came back and cleared the dishes. We did not order dessert. He paid. I did not argue because I did not have the energy to argue with him about a check.

We walked out.

The street was quiet. Spring Street at 10:20 p.m. on a Monday in June. A couple walking a small dog. The smell of garbage and exhaust and a cigarette from a doorway down the block. The yellow light of the restaurant window threw itself in a long rectangle onto the sidewalk behind us.

He turned to face me.

He had his hands in his pockets. The streetlight caught the new gray at his temple.

"Can we do this again sometime?"

"Rafael."

"I still love you, Leah."

I looked at him.

I looked at the man who had bled for eleven minutes on a parking-garage floor because I had vouched for a witness who lied. I looked at the scar I could not see through the shirt that ran from his shoulder to his hip. I looked at the fact that he had come back fourteen months later to tell me he loved me anyway. The only thing he had ever asked of me in the whole of our life together was that I let him love me, and that I had not, in the end, been able to do even that.

My chest ached.

I did not lie.

"I don't, Rafael. I can't revisit that. I just can't."

He nodded.

He did not look away. He did not look down. His face did the small thing it always did when he was absorbing a hit — the jaw a quarter-inch tighter, the eyes a quarter-inch steadier, no other change.

"Okay, Leah."

"I'm sorry."

"You don't have to be sorry."

"I am."

"Okay."

I left him standing on the sidewalk.

NINE

JULIAN

The whiskey was warm in my hand. I had been at the entrance for fifteen minutes.

The ballroom was on the rooftop of the Carlyle. Declan picked it because Thea once said, in passing, that the chandeliers looked like upside-down birthday cakes. Eight chandeliers. White peonies in glass cylinders down the center of every table. The hellebore Declan had not been able to name this morning crowded green between them. The string quartet was at the south wall, finishing the warm-up of the Pachelbel they were not actually going to play. Caterers crossed the room with trays of champagne flutes.

I was watching the door.