Page 209 of The Lies We Play

That almost makes me smile.

“She took me to the Frick when I was thirteen,” he says. “She showed me a Holbein and said, ‘this is what it looks like when a man paints a wife and not a woman.’”

I sit with that.

A wife and not a woman.

“She said that to you at thirteen?”

“She said many things to me at thirteen that I didn't understand until I was twenty-five.”

“What did you think she meant?”

“I thought she was talking about art.”

“And now?”

“Now I think she was talking about survival.”

His voice doesn’t break. Halston stays composed, and I have to sit beside him while he bleeds without making a sound.

He was thirteen and fourteen, and he didn't have the vocabulary for what was happening to her.

That is how he puts it.

As if vocabulary could have saved her.

He says he noticed her hair getting thinner. He noticed she stopped reading on Saturday afternoons. He noticed the curtains stayed closed longer in the townhouse. He noticed she wore lipstick less often. He noticed she laughed only when he said something she thought deserved the effort.

He noticed.

He didn't ask if she was all right.

“I was afraid she would say no,” he tells me.

“She knew you were a child,” I say.

His eyes close for half a second.

“She died when I was fourteen.”

I don’t speak.

He drinks half his glass of wine without looking up.

Then he says, very quietly, “The official cause was a heart event. She had a small inherited mitral valve issue from her mother’s side. It was on file with her cardiologist. The cardiologist signed the certificate. She was found in the morning by her housekeeper, Marie, who had been with her since I was born. The death was ruled cardiac.”

His voice has changed again.

This is the lawyer now.

The son has stepped aside so the lawyer can survive the sentence.

I hate that for him.

I hate that he needs it.

I take his hand before he can fold it back into himself.