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“Would it have made a difference? Knowing? Would you be here now if you’d known?” Neil’s words punched a ragged hole into my heart. Was this a breakup? Was El-Mudad leaving us?
No. No, that couldn’t happen. We’d only just started to spend real time together. To live our lives normally together. We’d just gotten back from Venice. Less than twenty-four hours before, El-Mudad and I had curled up in bed on a jet over the Atlantic, talking about how much we missed Neil and couldn’t wait to be with him.
It couldn’t be over now.
I’m not ready.
El-Mudad looked between the two of us, then down at the tabletop. “No. No, it wouldn’t have made a difference. And I wish you could have trusted me enough to tell me.”
“I swear, nothing will ever happen between me and Valerie—or anyone else—for as long as we’re together,” Neil said, reaching for El-Mudad’s hand. El-Mudad let him take it, and my lungs finally remembered how to work.
“And I hope that will be forever,” Neil added.
El-Mudad lifted Neil’s hand to his lips. “I hope so, as well. But we can’t have any more secrets. Not ones like that. Not ones that will hurt us.”
My muscles went weak with relief. Despite how foolish I probably looked, I put my head down on the table.
“Jet lag catching up with you, darling?” Neil asked gently.
I shook my head. Or, more accurately, rocked my forehead back and forth on the table. The glass felt cool and nice. “I don’t like fighting. That was seriously scary.”
“It was uncharted territory.” El-Mudad put his hand on my back and rubbed soothing circles. “But we sailed through it, didn’t we?”
“Remember when we had our first fight, Sophie?” Neil asked. And of course, I hadn’t forgotten. But I let him tell the story to El-Mudad. “We fought about work. It seemed so important at the time and seems so inconsequential now. I was cutting up something, a pepper, I think. I was so angry, I didn’t realize I was bleeding profusely and splashing it everywhere.”
My stomach turned over. “Oh my god, you don’t have to take me back there.”
“That was also the first time I told you that I loved you,” he reminded me.
I lifted my head just enough to make eye contact with him. “Then maybe for this first fight, we should all tell each other that.”
El-Mudad pushed his chair back and rose. He put his arms out for a hug. “I think that’s a brilliant idea.”
We all embraced there in the kitchen, wordlessly holding each other tight. We’d been ready to start a new chapter with El-Mudad. I just hadn’t realized that starting a new chapter would mean rereading parts of the old ones.
* * * *
We usually had Sunday dinner at our house because Neil liked to cook, and we had the bigger kitchen. The guesthouse was hardly a cottage; though the kitchen was smaller than ours, it was still bigger than any house I’d ever been in. Well, at least before I’d started seeing Neil. When Mom said she wanted to host the next one, I’d accepted, on the condition that our house guest was also invited. She hadn’t looked thrilled about it, but she’d insisted that El-Mudad was always welcome.
We piled into my Jaguar, the “family car.” El-Mudad sat in the passenger seat and Olivia and I in the back as Neil drove us the short distance to the house.
“Why can’t we take the golf cart?” Olivia asked for the thousandth time.
“Because it’s too cold.” Repeating that same answer over and over hadn’t gotten through to her, yet. I don’t know why I’d thought it would now.
“I want the golf cart!” Olivia shouted, slamming her upper body and head back on her car seat.
Mom had referred to this stage as being a “threenager.” I felt the comparison was particularly unfair to teenagers.
“Olivia,” Neil said sternly, his eyes darting to hers in the rearview mirror. “If you plan to fight the entire time we’re at Rebecca’s, we can take you back to the house.”
“Mariposa isn’t home!” she challenged him.
“No, but I could stay with you,” El-Mudad warned. “And I could watch football on every television in the house.”
That was enough to scare her straight, for the moment.
Olivia had become more willful since Christmas. I wondered if she resented us for leaving her with Valerie for so long. But that had been weeks ago, and surely three-year-olds didn’t hold grudges that long?
We pulled into the driveway and parked in front of the attached garage instead of in it, due to Mom’s fear of carbon monoxide poisoning. She’d heard once about some guy who’d turned his car on to warm it up before work, then he’d slipped and hit his head and his whole family suffocated from the exhaust. I wasn’t sure if it had actually happened or if it was apocryphal, but irrational fear caused by rumor or the local news had been handed down for generations of Scaife women.
