917-322-XXXX
I’m dying here Saina.
917-322-XXXX
Have you read it yet?
917-322-XXXX
Check your email.
917-322-XXXX
?
917-322-XXXX
Where are you?
Even though she’d deleted his number from her phone, Saina knew with a sick plunk that it was Grayson. That was his pattern. Their pattern. They would argue, and then Saina would turn off her phone and go to yoga or go for a walk or have drinks with friends, and Grayson would thrash around in his studio until he couldn’t take it any longer and then she’d turn her phone on to find eight missed texts and twice as many missed calls. Each time it flattered and embarrassed her. She tapped the email icon, waiting for it to load, her breath shorting in her lungs.
What was Saina doing, buried in her phone? Grace poked her. “Did Dad call? Or Leo?”
“No . . .”
“Then what?”
“I don’t . . . I’m not really sure. Wait a sec, let me look.”
Sometimes when Grace was with her siblings, she wanted to hold on to them, to make sure that they couldn’t get away and have lives that didn’t involve her. “Well, did he email?”
Andrew turned to her. “Leo! I forgot about the boyfriend. Grace, did you meet him?”
Grace looked at her sister as she spoke. “Yeah. I thought he was so cool. And nice. And easy to talk to. Grayson’s better-looking, but Leo’s definitely a better person. Uh . . . except that Saina broke up with him.”
“What? Why?”
Saina was still buried in her phone, so Grace answered for her. “Because he has a kid.”
She’d accidentally clicked on an email from her friend Lotte, inviting her to Montauk for the weekend, and she was still waiting for the email from Grayson to load when Grace’s response sank in. It wasn’t untrue. She broke up with him because he had a kid. Seriously, was everyone going to have a kid? She looked up at Andrew.
Saina looked so embarrassed that it embarrassed him. “Well, at least you know he’s not shooting blanks.”
“Yeah, well. It’s not really that he has a kid, it’s that he never told me about her until Grace somehow got it out of him.”
“How is that even possible?”
“I know! It was . . . well, it was a really dumb explanation.”
“But how long have you guys been together? A few months, right?”
“Off and on.”
“So how could it not have come out? Didn’t he see the kid?”
Did she have to answer all of these questions? “No. But supposedly because his ex-girlfriend was mad at him and wouldn’t let him see her.”
“But he was trying to?”
“I think so, yeah.”
“How long was he not allowed?”
“Oh god, Andrew, I don’t know.” Saina realized, as she did almost every time she saw him, that her brother was in every way a good person.
“Was it just, like, a little while? I’m just trying to figure out if she’s the crazy person in this situation.”
“I think everyone’s the crazy person.” Could she read Grayson’s email now? Saina looked at Andrew and then Grace.
“What?” asked Grace.
Why not just tell them? They weren’t little kids anymore. “It’s not from Leo, it’s actually an email from Grayson.”
Grace surprised herself by feeling jealous. It wasn’t that guys didn’t like her, but would they ever pine for her the way they did for Saina? She decided right then that that was what she wanted.
“Well, read it,” said Andrew.
“I’m just going to read it to myself. Do you guys want to go check and see if our luggage is out yet?”
“It’s not. Nothing is,” said Grace. “We can see the carousel from here.”
But Andrew pulled her up, and they went to go stand next to a trio of nuns in sky-blue habits.
Saina clicked on the email.
My love (because that’s what you are):
I’m just going to sit down here and pour it all out on the page. On the electronic page. You are my love Saina. You and no one else.