Page 88 of Grace & Henry's Holiday Movie Marathon
“I know,” I say. “But we’ll get through it, okay? I promise.”
We’re like this until the kids stop crying—until I stop crying. Then Bella asks, “Do you think maybe I can paint, too?”
“You want to paint with us?”
She rubs her eyes. “Yeah, I wanna try. It looks like fun.”
We’re driving in Dom’s two-door BMW. It took some time to get out of the city, like always, but we’re moving now, racing across wet, open road. Fifteen minutes ago, I wanted to be home immediately because I wanted to confirm what I suspected about Tim and Lauren Maxwell. Now, though, I wish Dom would slow down because once a fear is confirmed it can never be unconfirmed.
We stop at a red light. I look around the inside of his car, which, like his kitchen at the Italian Embassy, is pristine, and I think about how quickly my kids would trash it.
“I’m sorry, Grace,” he says. “You surprised me. I just—”
“Dom, don’t.”
“No,” he says. “We should talk about this.”
“Why start now? You’ve been avoiding me for a year.”
“I know. And like I said, that was shitty of me.”
“Light’s green, by the way,” I say.
He hits the gas, pushing me back in my seat.
“It’s not you, Grace. It’s—”
“Are you about to tell me that it’s not me, it’s you? You shouldn’t, because if you do I’m jumping out.”
I feel bad for Dom. He thinks I’m pissed about him breaking offour kiss. When Henry told me about Meredith kissing him, he described it as nice, and then he said, “But…” Kissing Domwasnice, but it felt off, tone-deaf, anticlimactic. It just didn’t feel right.
The real reason I’m pissed is that I’m nearly certain my life is about to be flipped upside down again. Being dead made Tim perfect, the bastard. Now I’m wondering who he even was.
We speed on in this beautiful, ridiculous car, passing the little grocery store where my mom and dad shop.
“That’s not what I was gonna say,” Dom says.
The car stereo isn’t on. I wish it were, so I could turn it all the wayup.
“It’snotyou. But it’s not me, either. It’s him.”
A street of lit-up mansions blurs past.
“You’re amazing,” Dom tells me. “And you’re beautiful, and you’re mean, but in this sweet way that I love. And I’ve thought about what it’d be like to be with you for, like, what, ten years?”
“Eleven, I think,” I say.
“Right. Eleven.” He shifts busily through gears, because of course this silly car has a manual transmission. “But whenever I look at you now,” he says, “I just think about him. We weren’t, like, blood brothers, but he was my friend, Grace, and you were his wife.”
Dom is right, and I know it. Tim is a ghost who haunts us all.
Another red light, a few residential turns, the park where Ian and Bella play, three speed bumps that we need to drive over excruciatingly slowly or apparently this car will explode. Then Dom pulls up to the curb outside my house. A flood of cold invades when I open the door, but I don’t get out, not yet.
“I’m sorry I kissed you,” I say. I could hurt him and tell him that I just wanted to kiss someone—anyone. He doesn’t deserve that, though. Plus, it wouldn’t be entirely true, because I’ve thought about being with him, too, and now I know that I don’t want to be with anyone.
“In another life,” he says, “it would’ve made my night.”
He holds out his hand, and when I put mine in his, he kisses one of my chapped knuckles.
