I blew him kisses and switched the phone off. I looked at Jean some more. His breathing was still labored.
It was only then I noticed the blood, dripping slowly from his wrist.
“We need to get that bandaged up,” I said quietly. “Do you want to rest, and then we’ll walk around a little?”
He opened his eyes a chink. “No, not this time, my lady. Prithee, take me back.”
I grasped his hand and pulled him toward the book-sized puddle.
CHAPTER 13
In the autumn of Lily’s third year, my intensive period of spying began. TheFree to Beoffice was in a dilapidated building in one of the neighborhoods of Tel Aviv’s Old North. Once every few days I found myself just “dropping by,” hoping to catch Halimi and Nina in the act. That didn’t happen. I saw her a few times, and my heart pounded so loudly I thought the entire editorial board would hear it, but she was always sitting with the graphic designers, bugging the shit out of them with her obsessiveness.
I browsed through Halimi’s phone at every opportunity. This required both tenacity and extreme stealth. When I managed to get my hands on his phone, I would scour WhatsApp, Gmail, Facebook Messenger. Every single text, emoji, or YouTube clip that Halimi and Nina shared sent twinges of physical pain through my body that would then morph into dizzying weakness.
I tracked Halimi on Google Maps and, after determining Nina’s home address through mutual friends, understood why he spent so many evenings on Nachmani Street in Tel Aviv. I found myself walking to her neighborhood. It became second nature to check her activity on social media. Whenever there was a correlation between the information I’d milked from Halimi’s phone (Google Maps check-in at TaiZu, an upscale Asian restaurant, from 7:40 to 11:20 p.m.) and Nina’s posts (anenigmatic and beautiful selfie in the bathroom of the same restaurant within that exact time frame), I felt something akin to how drugs spread through the body. In this case, it was a powerful drug—both exhilarating and depressing, like a shot of sugar, followed by a shot of insulin.
I was honest enough to tell my sister, who said I was addicted to the thrill of stalking Halimi. I disconnected our Zoom call by slamming down the cover of my laptop and didn’t speak to Dina for days. After I spent a week refusing to answer her calls, she sent me a long text, apologizing for what she said. She was empathetic and begged me to answer her calls. When she tried the next day, I picked up.
She sat in an oversized sweater, facing the screen. Eva sat beside her, scribbling in a coloring book. My sister gave me her Mother Gaia look and asked me gently how I was feeling.
“The same,” I answered, my emotions blunted.
“Nothing changed?” my sister asked.
“What could’ve changed?” I responded.
Dina sighed and asked what I was going to do about it. I knew she was going to ask, but I didn’t have an answer. I couldn’t express what I hoped for or expected to happen. Halimi’s behavior paralyzed me. He simply acted as if everything were business as usual. Brimming with affection yet distracted at the same time, focused on what he needed but spaced out with everything else. Perhaps more than usual. The fact that he acted like everything was normal, or almost normal, drove me insane. For the first time ever, I began suspecting that my entire life with Halimi was one big lie.
“So, why don’t you confront him?” Dina asked. Her hand shot out to steady a cup of water Eva was about to knock over as she dipped her paintbrush into it with dangerous enthusiasm.
Of course I asked myself why, over and over again, I really did. That whole time I refused to speak to Dina, I was forced to admit she had a point. I’d never experienced such masochistic pleasure as the way I feltwhen I knew Halimi was lying to my face. But that’s not why I didn’t want to confront him.
It was tough to admit: I was afraid of his manipulations. I knew that if I accused him to his face, if I demanded explanations, he would somehow convince me that there was nothing wrong. And if he had done anything wrong, I would have to forgive him on the spot. I wanted to catch him red-handed, so he would have no choice but to admit that he was the lowest of the low, declare his undying love for me, and dedicate the rest of his life to making it up. I was fantasizing about catching them together when he texted me yet another lame excuse as to why he was running late.
“So, it’s business as usual?” Dina asked with distaste.
I didn’t answer for a few moments. My sister had already proven, on multiple occasions, that she was capable of analyzing my behavior in highly unflattering terms and that she had no problem sharing her thoughts with me.
“Yup, business as usual,” I finally answered. I took a prickly kind of satisfaction in the knowledge that Halimi was clueless. It was a covert competition, in which my sole advantage lay in knowing we were competitors. We both acted normally, more or less, and we were both lying—except that I knew he was lying, whereas he had no idea I was.
We even had sex a few times after that text from Nina. As far as I was concerned, our fucking was desperate and angry, and I think in those moments even Halimi, in a repressed sort of way, sensed that I knew everything; perhaps it even turned him on. All this added an extraordinary edge to our routine performance, and sometimes the sex was truly great. This only made me sadder. Halimi got used to me feeling a bit down after sex, regardless of how good it had been. After a while, he simply accepted it.
“God, that’s terrible,” Dina said with a mixture of fear and admiration. This stressed me out a bit. Since we were kids—or more accurately,since I was a kid and she was a teenager—it was clear who was the wild one and who was the good girl.
“How much longer are you going to drag this out?” Dina asked with uncharacteristic despondency. Eva had tired of painting and left the room. I wondered how much Hebrew she understood and whether she’d remember snatches of this conversation.
“I don’t know …” I said. I really didn’t know. It’s true I fantasized about a confession from Halimi and the grand gestures he’d be forced to make to atone, but I couldn’t imagine how we could find our way back to what we had before. My ability to keep going surprised me—to work on grueling translations; joke around with friends in cafés; listen to Libby’s woes with her boss and hear about her one-night stands; and read stories to Lily, fix her meals, and find her fun clips on YouTube.
“In my opinion, you ought to confront him. Not for him, for you,” Dina said quietly. I saw concern in her eyes; she didn’t want to make me mad again.
“You’re right,” I told her. “Soon.”
Back in my own time, I pulled the ancient coin out of my bag and showed Jean how old and tarnished it was. That finished him off completely. His hand lay limply in mine as I submerged the coin in the puddle, and as the whirlpool ejected us into the cold air of the spring of 1240, I was afraid the transition had caused him irreversible damage.
For half an hour he lay there, eyes closed, limbs extended, pale and glistening with cold sweat on the ground near the spring. Brunette welcomed us with an outburst of barking that prompted a guard to come check on us. It was not Geoffroy of Tours.
“Seigneur d’Arsur!” he cried when he saw Jean lying on the ground. He threw me a disdainful look.
