Page 13 of The Lies We Play

Guilt hits me, fast and awful.

Even now.

Even lying in a clinic outside Zurich, not knowing where one husband’s body is being kept or why the other has not come for me, I still can’t stop managing my mother’s feelings.

Truly inspiring. Put it on my tombstone: Here lies Livia. Even during neurological recovery, she remained emotionally available to everyone except herself.

I close my eyes.

Open them again.

“And Creed.”

My mother’s confusion is instant.

“Creed?”

“Lafontaine,” I add, hoping that’d help.

“Sweetheart, why are you asking about⁠—”

“Has he called?”

Her face gives me the answer before her mouth can ruin me with it. She’s hiding something.

“Called you?” She looks at me, almost horrified. “Who is this Creed Lafontaine? You don’t know anyone with that name.”

“I do,” I argue. “I do know him.”

“No one has called you. You haven’t been able to take calls. The clinic has been screening everything.”

“Has he tried?”

“I don’t think⁠—”

“Mom.”

She swallows.

“I don’t think this person would have any reason to⁠—”

“Has anyone called for me?” I ask. “Anyone.”

“Livia.”

“In three months?”

“Honey, you need rest.”

“Three months,” I say, and my voice breaks on the number. “No one?”

She looks down.

My left hand betrays me again beneath her palm. The tremor rolls through my fingers, small and horrible and mine. She smooths it without looking, still speaking in that soothing mother’s voice: telling me I’ve been brave, telling me the doctors are pleased, telling me my father is at a hotel in the city, and my brother flew in last week, and everything has been arranged.

Of course it has.

That is what rich families do when the truth becomes inconvenient. They arrange. They soften. They redirect. They write checks, issue statements, and hire attorneys who say “privacy” as if it is a virtue instead of a locked door.