Page 210 of The Lies We Play
Not hard. Not like I’m trying to pull him out of the story before he’s done telling it. Just enough pressure to let him know I’m here, and I’m not leaving because the room got difficult.
That’s what you do for the man you love.
You hold the part of him he can’t hold while he keeps speaking.
He takes a breath.
“I found a folder when I was twenty-one. In Cornelius’s study. Inside it was a memo. Two pages. From a partner at Whelan and Hollander. It used a word the public death certificate didn't use.”
I wait.
He looks at me.
“The word was suspicious.”
He scoffs. “That was the only word on the page that was not procedural,” he says. “Everything else was about who to call, what order to call them in, what to release to the trustees, and how to handle the foundation announcement. Just the one word. Suspicious.”
“Who wrote it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who requested the memo?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did Cornelius know what it meant?”
“I think so.”
“Did he tell you?”
“No.”
I hear the anger under that.
Not at Cornelius. Not only.
At time. At death. At the men who left him with folders instead of answers.
“I have never been able to find out who put it there,” Halston says. “I have never been able to find out what it meant. I have, in eight years of being able to think about it, talked myself in and out of every theory a person can have about a parent’s death. I have decided, mostly, that I'm not going to know.”
He is calm.
Too calm.
Calm the way a man is calm after standing in front of the same locked door for years and calling it architecture so he doesn’t have to call it grief.
I squeeze his hand, but I don't say anything.
He looks at my hand for a moment.
Then he keeps going.
Halston was fifteen when Bradford remarried.
He says he was sent to boarding school before the wedding because it was more convenient for everyone involved if he had a schedule. He was not invited to the rehearsal dinner because, in Constance’s words, his tournament obligations conflicted.
“They didn’t conflict,” he says.
