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Eve doesn’t look confused by this, which suggests to Gwyn that he has told her what he is doing: blaming it on something that isn’t blameworthy. A conversion, a spiritual change. And later, once the wounds have healed, once enough time has passed, and it is more allowed, he will have Eve meet his children, even Gwyn herself. When Eve can be aboveboard, not someone worthy of scorn. This is my new girlfriend, he will say. This is Eve Stone.
“But here’s the flip side,” Gwyn says. “When you love someone, when you have spent several decades loving him, you begin to see his insides even before he can see them. You know what he is going to do before he does.”
“And what is he going to do? Stay with you?”
“I’m not saying that.”
“What are you saying?”
Gwyn pulls the check out of her pocket, a check for twenty thousand dollars—six thousand more than they’d agreed on for tonight, just in case the extra money is helpful, just in case it came to this.
She walks up to the table, holds the check between them. “I’m saying that I think that you should take this,” she says.
Eve is quiet, shaking her head. She doesn’t want to take it. Gwyn understands that. To take it means to accept that things may end badly. It means to accept something that you can’t consider when you are in the throes of loving someone. That he may leave, just like he left someone else. That you may not prove to be different. That you may prove to be worthy of leaving too.
“But why?” Eve says.
“Why what?”
“Why is this what you want?”
Gwyn decides to be honest for the first time that day, decides there is no harm now. She sits down across from her.
“It’s not what I want, Eve,” Gwyn says. “None of this. It’s just what I’m doing now.”
“Because you wanted to meet me? Well, you’ve met me.”
“No, it’s not for that. It’s for something else.”
They look at each other, and Gwyn remembers sitting here with the Buckleys so many times: when Nate was a little boy, when Georgia was just born. The time she and Thomas were sitting in these exact spots one night when Marsha made them this terrible cheese fondue, laughing together about how awful it was.
How does it happen? How does someone who was there with you, in all of those moments, let himself get so far away that he ends up putting you here in a moment like this one?
She holds out the check again. “If he loves you the way you think he does, if you’re right, nothing that does or doesn’t happen at this party is going to put that at risk,” she says.
Eve stares at the check. And then she straightens out her dress, her jeans. And Gwyn can see her trying to decide how badly this is going to go, trying to wager that against the large sum of money.
“You don’t even have to come into the party, except to bring in the cake. And that’s only because I made it. The rest of the time, the servers will take care of everything. You probably won’t even see him all night.”
She is silent. “I need to understand why,” she says.
Because, Gwyn wants to say, maybe I’ll be able to organize it so he sees you at just the moment that I need him to.
“I know you don’t owe me anything, but you also don’t not owe me anything. This was my family. This was my entire life. And it’s not your fault. But then again, that is just semantics. Because if you didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be standing here. If you didn’t want to be with him, all of this would be beside the point.”
“He might have done this for someone else.”
“But he didn’t, did he? He did it for you. We are here now because he chose to do this. For you.”
Eve looks at her, and for a second Gwyn doesn’t know what she is going to do. That’s the way it is, isn’t it? And then she does it.
She takes the check out of Gwyn’s hand. “Where would you like the trays?” she asks.
“The trays?”
“Where would you like me to start setting up?”
“Over there is fine,” Gwyn says, pointing at the counter. “Over there would be great.”
