Page 68 of Lair

Even if it means you cannot be with him.

I shut my eyes, my bottom lip trembling. Do not let the howling grief come. Wait just a little longer, until he is asleep, for your escape.

You’ve done it before, after all.

Hello, sun.

Slipping out of bed and to the door, thinking, Do not look at him. If you do, that will be the end of you.

Returning to the master suite and changing into a clean set of clothes, grabbing my purse. Enduring the moment of racketing terror when I steal out onto the main deck, not knowing if there’ll be a deckie out on watch. The air is crisp and cool, Antibes’ Port Vauban with its high medieval walls still a vague shape in the dawn gloom. I cast one last look about for any crew members astir and dart to the passerelle, onto the dock, away.

It’s happening. This, here, is happening.

I’m leaving him. Like a thief in the night, I am leaving him.

And I feel it, the thought nosing to the surface like the maw of a shark, bright with disaster: How will my life ever progress from this moment? Why would I want it to? Everything has split open, and there is nothing to be figured out anymore.

I’m sobbing when I call Cailee, she can barely hear me through my grief.

Come. Please. Please come.

Stumbling about through the stone arch of the harbor and clutching my stomach as if it had been sliced open. Adrian, my Adrian, I croon to myself, over and over, the words a cherished wound.

THIRTY-FOUR

Cailee is staying in a sort of crew house in the chic resort town of Juan-les-Pins, a twenty-five-minute walk from Antibes. Which means I have twenty-five minutes to do what I have to do.

It all seems so simple and straightforward: I must forget Adrian Voper. Store away our time together, packed up like so much treasure, so that I will never again bump into it and be waylaid.

This, surely, should be easy. I’ve done it before, after all.

But it isn’t. It’s impossible. Because this is a different thing, isn’t it? An altogether different thing. He is not like Josh, to be easily banished and turned, in my mind, into a stranger that I’ll be able to look back on years later with a puzzling fondness or detachment, wondering what role he ever played in my life.

No. Adrian is not like that. He comes back to me in wave after wave of overwhelming recollection—his voice in the submersible, the first time he laughed, lifting away the blindfold to show me the Northern Lights—and I know he will never stay in his proper place, set aside and done with. I will suffer through these memories, jolting me unexpectedly and with varying degrees of intensity, for the rest of my life.

I am crying again when Cailee finds me sitting on the stone bench by the harbor, and I’m smelling her rich cinnamon hair and she’s stroking my head as she rocks me, wrapping me up in sisterly assurances: He was a jerk. This’ll pass. They’re all monsters in the end.

I am on Cailee’s recovery regimen now: shrug it all off, keep everything at bay with a steady dose of bright busyness.

First on her list: emotional eating. She leads me away from the waterfront haunts of the local yachties—“Ooooover iiiiiit”—and through the narrow, cobbled streets of Antibes as if she’s lived here all her life. She’s a full-blown tour guide. Her wrist flicks as she points out tourist traps, underground absinthe bars, men to avoid. Everything a blur of painted shopfronts and lamp posts hung with explosions of flowers (were those roses?). I’m about to pass out from dizziness when we end up in a square full of warbling pigeons and an ornate merry-go-round of dubious functionality. In short order we’re sitting outside a café, legs crossed and watching vacationing celebrities and trophy wives with glossy shopping bags pass by (was that a Hermès logo?) as we devour crepes smothered in whipped cream, Nutella and almond flakes. Cailee keeps flicking glances at me, and I know. She’s waiting for me to tell her what happened.

I want to. I want nothing more than to pour my heart out, unload everything so that she can do her calm, analytical post-mortem on the relationship, as she always does, so I can make peace with it.

But I can’t. I can never tell Cailee why I left Adrian. I can never tell her, my best friend, what he is.

What, then? I sit on this secret forever, in crushing isolation. Even if it hurts her. Even if it hurts our relationship. And then what? How can I go on living my life when I know what I know now? A demon world behind this one, grinning through the cracks, turning such everyday things as shopping bags and fucking flowers into objects of dread.

A couple catches my eye. A slender woman flushed with youth, an enormous diamond on her finger, and a slightly older man in shorts and Ray-Bans peering at jewelry in a shop window. I watch the man place a hand on the small of her back and wonder how long it’ll be before their marriage opens up, like a trapdoor, and she sees the grinning fiend in him, the many leering violences of masculinity. At least with Adrian, I had known what I had. What pitfalls to navigate. His appetites purified into comprehensible, externalized horrors. With men—with normal men—that was not the case. That was not the case at all.

There I go again. Still holding on to the positives in a relationship. Still unable to let go.

Attagirl, Arie.

It’s mid-afternoon when we check in to the Royal Antibes Hotel. Cailee, bless her, made reservations for us before meeting me so I don’t have to stay in her party animal crew house. She has to lead me about by the elbow, as if I’m lost in a black hole—time is blurring and curving like light, moving on without me. Life is moving on without me. The flamboyantly uniformed baggage boy keeps glancing at me in the elevator, and my stomach turns—the mere thought of attention from any man besides Adrian makes me sick. Then our room door is shut and locked, the “Do Not Disturb” sign swinging from the doorknob, and our girls-only breakup recovery getaway officially begins.

I don’t remember much of that weekend. Days spent lolling in bed in fluffy white bathrobes, painting each other’s nails and laughing like maniacs, ordering room service while we watched TV. Then the hours of Cailee holding me as the sobs welled up, the waves of obliterating grief washed over me.

On Monday she wakes me. She has daywork and needs another hand. I should come along.

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