The Children(36)

Hank was curled on his side, turned away from her. She kissed his shoulder and went to make coffee. When she brought him a cup, he was awake, pulling his shirt on. His expression was pensive and he didn’t look up.

“Hey.” Guin shifted, knees cracking. “You’re not leaving yet, are you?”

Hank stood, pulling on his jeans. “Why? Did you want to talk?”

Unsettling emphasis on talk. “I mean, it’s Saturday. Regina doesn’t need me till later, I thought we could hang out.”

Hank buttoned his fly with the focus of an explosives specialist. Guin wavered between asking and changing the subject.

“We could get breakfast,” she said brightly.

The look he gave her was brief but piercing. “I’m not hungry.”

Guin watched him another minute, then retreated to the kitchen to busy herself with nothing. He walked past her and put his shoes on at the door. Straightened, cleared his throat.

“I’m heading out.”

She kissed him goodbye. As she pulled away, he stopped her, face inches from her own.

“I love you.”

“I know you do.” She leaned in again, he turtled his head back.

“I love you, Guin.”

“And I do, too.”

Hank breathed in, eyes narrowing, and she braced. He only said, “Good,” and kissed her one more time.

The kiss had a taste to it that she knew well. A pang of ending. But—she reminded herself as she locked the door—they would never end. Not until death at the earliest. That was what engagement was for. She glanced at her hand for reassurance.

Panic burst in her temples when she saw her empty finger. In the next moment she remembered the factory, the sting. Her knuckle was tender when she pinched it, so she fed the ring onto a chain and fixed it around her neck.

In the bathroom mirror she appraised its minute blue-and-white glint, the way it fell off-center between her collarbones. She hadn’t gotten up the courage to ask Hank whether the ring had been given to the other woman first.

The woman before her. Jenna, Hank’s six-month fiancée.

First Jenna was a hair tie Guin found in his bathroom, strung with two dark strands. A faded Georgetown T-shirt washed up around the back leg of his bed, and in his fridge, camouflaged among the million jars of chili crisp, a long-expired bottle of lavender kombucha. Then she was a late-night reveal, whom Hank talked about in the resonant, fake-wise tones of the deeply wounded. A former university soccer player who worked in fundraising at a nonprofit. The breaking of the engagement was, he told her, a mutual thing.

Guin looked Jenna up once. Once or twice. She was exactly the sunny-shouldered, shiny-haired nightmare you’d expect. She had photogenic friends and a rescue dog named Sherman, and she was always being photographed in front of some kind of gorge or peak. Just two weeks ago she went to Dublin with her mom and sister. Lots of nice pictures taken in pubs.

Guin wasn’t entirely stupid. Of course she knew it was the same ring. Hank was living in brownstone Brooklyn on a teacher’s salary. The real question was, to what degree was their own speedy engagement a direct product of his first one?

Better to pin it to Hank’s endless romantic optimism than his recently broken heart. Some men were just the marrying kind.





Three Months Ago




It was May, the evening warm and rainless. Guin walked across the Brooklyn Bridge to meet her boyfriend at a restaurant near the water.

The restaurant he’d picked was nice, the kind of place where the food had more provenance than flavor. They sat in a flickering garden, candles and late spring light glazing their plates and half-empty wineglasses into a Vermeer still life.

Hank was nervous. For once he wasn’t plowing through his food, wasn’t mopping up the dregs with bread then eating whatever was left on Guin’s plate. He alternated between looking determinedly at his plate then up at her, with accusatory hound dog eyes.

She knew why. Two nights ago, wound up with her in his bed, he said, “What if you lived here.”

He’d paused then. Waiting, maybe, for her to rush in. When she didn’t, he went on, made it plausibly deniable. “Right here, in my arms.”

He tightened them. The room’s dreamy air tightened, too. Its molecules changed, became prickly and malevolent. Guin noticed herself breathing and, in noticing, forgot how. In, out. In, out. Jesus, wasn’t this supposed to be automatic?

“Guin.” He leaned back, frowning. “Are you hyperventilating?”

“No.”

Hank watched her uncertainly, then his jaw set. “If you’re not ready to live together, you can say so.”

She’d reached for the nearest, weakest joke. “So.”

“Got it,” he said shortly, and switched out the light.

There was that. It wouldn’t be the whole story, though, would it? It was never anything she’d done, in the end. It was always just her. Inevitably the things men liked about her at the start—her independence, her resolve, that thing in her that everyone she dated named differently: spontaneity, absolute chill, a refreshing lack of commitment obsession—would curdle into the things that made them hate her.

The uncomfortable date. The beautiful, bad restaurant. This was a breakup.

Her wine savored suddenly of nail polish remover. It was inevitable that she and Hank wouldn’t last, but now that the end was here, she was gripped with unexpected sorrow. She thought they’d have more time. Hadn’t yet begun looking for an escape route. Or an exit wound.