Emily turned to face him. “Morning,” she said. “I hope I didn’t do anything too unforgivable last night.”
He shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “You were fine.” His hair looked windswept and he was holding a bag of breakfast pastries. “I heard your song,” he added. “While I was unlocking the door. It’s beautiful.”
He put the pastries down on the table.
“Thank you,” she answered. “I—I hope it’s okay I was using your guitar.”
“Of course.” Rob pulled a piece off a cinnamon roll, leaving the rest in the bag. “Are you writing a song about your husband?”
Emily nodded and all of a sudden felt guilty, like she was somehow betraying Rob by doing that. “It’s the song I started in New York,” she explained.
Rob sat down on the couch next to Emily, wiping his fingers on his shorts, and she handed him the guitar. “I write songs about you,” he said, strumming a few chords, almost as if he didn’t realize he was doing it, “and you write songs about him. Not about me.”
She felt like she needed to apologize. “I might write a song about you one day,” she said.
He looked at her, thoughtful, as if he were wondering if that statement was true or just something she said to placate him, and strummed again. The excitement of last night seemed to have bled out of both of them. “How are you feeling?” he asked.
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “Thank you for taking care of me last night. Are you feeling okay?”
“Not in the best shape of my career,” he said. “I kept drinking after I put you to bed.”
Emily stood. “Want some more coffee?” she asked.
He nodded and she walked over to fill two mugs with one of the one-cup machines.
As she was walking back to him, his phone rang. “It’s my girls on FaceTime,” he said. “Would you mind staying out of the frame?”
Emily put his mug on the end table next to the couch and walked, with her own mug, back to her room.
“Well hello there, lovely ladies!” she heard him say as she closed the door.
She missed Ezra. She missed Ari. Maybe she could jump on FaceTime with her sister. Coffee in hand, she walked over to her night table and found her phone there. Ezra had written back to her text: I read your journal. There aren’t enough words.
Emily stared at what he’d written. What did he mean? Enough words for what? Enough words to speak to her again?
Her coffee churned in her stomach and she walked out onto the hotel’s balcony to will the feeling away.
She dialed on her phone.
“Hello?”
“Priya?” Emily responded.
Priya’s voice came through, warm and clear. “Hey there. How’s your Mexican getaway? Are you and Ezra back on track?”
“Not really,” Emily said. “It’s . . . kind of a mess.” The waves crashed in front of her, cresting and falling. “I’m here with Rob, actually. But not romantically. We’re sleeping in different bedrooms.”
“Whoa,” Priya said. “Well. I can do the thing where I pretend to be a normal person and support you even if you’re doing something problematic. Or we can really talk.”
Emily laughed softly. “I think I might be beyond the normal-person response now. I feel like I keep making stupid decisions even though I know they’re stupid. I convince myself they’re right, that they’re the thing I’m meant to do, but in my heart I know they’re complicating everything even more.”
“What do you mean?” Priya asked.
“I think . . .” Emily thought about it; she thought about her life as if it were someone else’s. “I think Ezra disappointed me so deeply when he wasn’t there after our miscarriage that I keep testing the boundaries of his love for me. Kind of like—will you still love me if I do this? Or that? If I fly to Mexico? If I become a musician? If I show you all of the really messed-up parts of myself? I feel like I want him to prove to me that he loves me anyway, and he keeps showing me the opposite. So I push harder. I love him, but I think I’m afraid he doesn’t love me—he loves a particular version of me, but when things get tough he runs. What if he doesn’t come back?”
Priya cleared her throat on the other end of the line. “I could see how what you’ve been doing falls into that paradigm. And I think it’s quite possible that you’re doing some of this as a reaction to Ezra, but it seems to me that some of this is about your own happiness. For the last few months, you haven’t seemed happy at work—I really realized it when you were talking about being a sin eater. I was going to talk to you, but then you had the miscarriage and it didn’t seem the right time. Anyway, now you were given a chance to do something you used to love, so you went. You could’ve stayed, but you chose to leave, to go to Mexico and see if your dream was there. It’s not all about Ezra.”