Page 44 of You Can't Hurt Me

“Everything okay?” he asks, noticing my distracted expression.

“Sure,” I reply, a wave of anxiety slides over me. My mind spins with the complexities of his story, their past. I want to believe there are no more secrets lurking.

We’re in the car park and he reaches for the key; the electronic bleep of the car doors cuts the air like a final full stop. I slip into the passenger seat and he starts the engine.

“I guess every memoir creates a version of the truth, and that’s what I’m asking you to do,” he says. “You’re so good at adopting her voice. For a narrative that suits all of us? Makes us all our best selves?”

“Sure. It’s just—it’s a lot to think about, a lot more work. We need a plan,” I say, more decisively than I feel.

He peers through the windshield, a fine rain like needles streams into the beam of his headlights as he navigates the narrow lanes back to the highway. We say little on the ride until London draws nearer and our conversation lightens. I joke about the waitress who took a shine to him as we continued working on the book at the restaurant. At some point we fall into reflective silence instead. I think back to his confession, the shifting sands of truth in the Reid marriage, wondering how accurate his memories really are, what he’s really hiding from me.

Either way, I tell myself, it’s a better story, even if we have to edit and remold. The ultimate power couple, gilding each other’s achievements, gilded on the surface, rotten underneath.

In the hypnotic glare of the highway signs that flash up before me, my mind fizzes with possibilities. There’s a lot of stuff to reframe now, but also so much more material to work with. We’ll definitely need to bury the infidelity, but we can allude to their smaller struggles and differences, how every marriage needs hard work to maintain it, the nature of forgiveness and growth. If I hit the right tone, it could be exactly the kind of “honest material” Priya’s looking for after all.

Nate fixes his gaze on the road ahead as we draw closer to my apartment. I’m suddenly acutely aware of his presence beside me in the car. How funny that at first it was Eva that drew me, her voice inside my head calling me on; I had to follow her story to the source. Now, somehow...as Nate draws up to my street, it is his voice in my head, reciting the new opening chapter of his book,ourbook.

“So.” I sit up straighter as he parks the car, turns to me. “I have a road map in my head. Changes, revisions, more interviews. We need to be way more focused in the short time we have. But I think we can do it.”

“I know we can,” he says. “Thank you for being such a good listener, Anna.”

I click off my seat belt and his arm reaches over reflexively to say goodbye.

His lips graze my cheek, shrinking the distance between us. There is a beat of stillness when one of us could or should move away. But we don’t.

My chest freezes. I tilt my face up to his, lips parting. His mouth moves over mine into a kiss, an exquisite second of free fall. I press against him in the darkness and he shifts his body, a statement of sorts, kissing me more urgently. He breathes hard, I find it difficult to breathe at all. For a few brief seconds there is nothing except us, but then, a sound. A car door slams nearby and we pull apart instinctively, the world outside the car slipping back in. In the dull trickle of streetlight, we study each other in silent bemusement.

“Ah. Anna, the last thing I want to do is make this difficult for you—for us. It’s been a strange dynamic, over this past month of working together.” He hesitates, fumblingly he reaches for my hand.

I nod. “I suppose this trip didn’t make it any easier.”

“It was a terrible idea,” he says and we both laugh as he pulls me toward him again, his mouth on mine, longer and more intense. This time he pulls away first, looks at me intently, his demeanor shifting. “I should let you go. I’m so sorry.” He shakes his head. “It’s...bad timing, all wrong. I—”

“No, you’re right. I should—”

“I want you to know I’m not normally like this,” he interrupts. “You’re the first person I’ve been remotely... Well, the first time since...” I can’t bear his apologetic tone. Glancing out the window up at my empty apartment, I feel a sudden nausea, an overwhelming desire to be away from him.

“Really, it’s nothing,” I say, pointlessly.

He kisses me more chastely now on my cheek. I move away, stung by the formality of it, by his self-control, ashamed somehow that it is he who holds back, not me.

He crossed a professional line for her, why won’t he cross the line for me?

I reach down to grab my handbag, scramble to release the door. The rush of raw air from outside wraps around me as I step out.

“Bye, Anna,” he says. I smile, struggling to regain my senses, to appear unscathed.

“Nothing happened. Nothing at all,” I repeat to myself, over and over, in the darkness.

Eva’s Self-Reflection Journal

12 March 2019

Me: “Can we talk a little more about your upbringing? Your parents?”

Patient X: “I don’t really have much family to speak of. Most of my family is dead.”

Me: “That must have been tough for you, and you’re an only child?”

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