Page 208 of The Lies We Play

“Yes.” He looks at me then, and something in his face goes raw before he contains it. “They removed her from the foundation board, where she had sat for ten years. They argued she had not been substantially involved in the foundation’s recent work, which was, on a technicality, defensible. They forced a settlement that was generous on paper. Five million plus the East Sixty-Third townhouse.”

“Generous on paper,” I repeat.

“That is how the Saint Claires apologize for murder before it happens.”

The sentence is so calm I almost miss what it costs him.

Almost.

He drinks again, and I let him.

“I lived in Greenwich with my father,” he says, “and with the woman who, three weeks after my mother left the house, moved in.”

“Constance?”

He nods. “Constance.”

“He had been with her for three years before the divorce,” Halston says. “I knew. I had known about his affairs since I was six.”

“Six?”

“I saw him kissing other women. More than once.” His mouth tightens. “I caught him having sex with the maid once.”

The image hits me hard enough that my hand tightens on his knee before I can stop it.

Halston looks down at my hand.

Then up at me.

“I didn’t know what to do with the information,” he says.

“You were a kid.”

“I was a Saint Claire child. Those are not always treated as the same thing.”

My anger comes hot.

I force it to stay useful.

“You were a kid,” I say again.

This time, he doesn’t argue.

Annaline lived in the East Sixty-Third townhouse for almost three years.

He tells me about Saturdays.

Not in a straight line. Halston doesn’t know how to tell this part without making it sound curated, and I can feel him fighting that instinct. He wants to give me clean history. I want the fracture. I want the mother inside the story, not the exhibit label.

So I ask small questions.

“What did you do when you saw her?”

“Museums,” he says.

“Always?”

“Often. The Frick. The Met. The Neue Galerie. She liked places where people were required to lower their voices.”