Page 194 of The Lies We Play

Gratitude and offense are very efficient emotions. They help me multitask.

Eleonora—my new bodyguard—arrived yesterday afternoon at the institute while I was pretending to work and doing an extraordinary impression of a woman who had not spent the night being gutted by three men, two family dynasties, and one impossible truth.

She was tall, somewhere in her thirties, dressed like a curator who knew which paintings were fake and which patrons were worse. Her Italian carried that precise Florentine edge of someone who had lived here long enough to belong without needing to perform belonging for anyone.

I hated that I liked her immediately.

I also hated that she took one look at me and seemed to know exactly how close I was to dissolving into an emotional puddle beneath my own drafting table. Which would have been unfortunate, since the institute frowns upon structural collapse in staff members before lunch.

“Byron Langdon and Fitzhenry Everhart sent me,” she said.

I blinked at her.

Fitzhenry, I knew. Byron Langdon meant nothing to me.

Then she added, “Mr. Lafontaine hired the company.”

And everything inside me went painfully still.

I stood there in my studio, surrounded by sketches, clay studies, and the sour little coffee I had forgotten to drink three hours earlier, while Creed’s name moved through the room like a hand over a bruise.

Mr. Lafontaine.

Creed.

The man who had not searched for me—or was it found? I’m now confused, still hurt, and anxious. Not a great combo.

But the point is that he wasn’t there then. Not when I was gone. Not when I had needed someone to look hard enough, long enough, fiercely enough to tear the world apart and find me in the wreckage of it.

He hadn’t.

And somehow, stupidly, humiliatingly, some part of me still hopes he’ll reach for me. Not metaphorically. I wish it were metaphorical. Metaphors are respectable.

This was worse.

This was my body hearing his name and forgetting every intelligent thing my brain had ever assembled. This was grief with muscle memory. This was heartbreak, making room for want because apparently my survival instincts had all the dignity of a raccoon in a bakery dumpster.

I missed him.

I was furious with him.

I needed him with an ache so private it felt indecent.

Eleonora didn't rush me. She held a small paper bag in one hand and a coffee in the other.

She set the coffee on my workbench. Then the bag.

“A phone,” she said. “You can call when you are ready. There is a note from Mr. Everhart inside.”

I glanced at the bag as if it might contain a snake.

Honestly, I might have preferred the snake. Snakes are direct. Snakes don't send you mysterious phones or hire people to deliver them and then remain emotionally unavailable from a distance.

“I’m your . . .” Eleonora paused, not from uncertainty, but from the faint irritation of someone forced to use a word too dramatic for the job. “Bodyguard.”

I stared at her.

She continued, “I’ll be in the building from now on. Three doors down at the trattoria during the day. At the corner across from your apartment at night. You will not see me unless you need me.”