Page 215 of The Lies We Play

“Yeah.”

“Look at me.”

He looks at me.

His face is composed, but barely. The conference-room man is gone. The lawyer is gone. The boy who watched his mother be taken from a house one rule at a time is sitting beside me, grown now, beautiful and furious and terrified that love is another thing his family can weaponize.

I say, “You think I’d say no?”

He doesn’t answer.

He just looks at me.

So I ask the question that matters more.

“You think Liv would say no?”

His mouth does the thing.

The small movement that means he wants to believe me, but has trained himself not to accept relief too easily.

“No,” he says.

Almost.

“No,” I say. “She wouldn’t. I wouldn’t.”

He looks down at our hands.

“Never,” I say, and the word doesn't come out loud. It comes out certain. “Not because this is easy. Not because we don’t understand what your family can do. Never because you are not something Liv and I survive around. You are someone we survive with.”

“Creed.”

“Listen to me.”

He listens.

I see him decide to.

That choice hurts a little too.

I say, “We’re not marrying the man who walked away. We’re marrying the man you decide to be. If this is important to you, then it’s important to us. We’ll figure it out as we go.”

His face changes.

His mouth opens.

Nothing comes out.

I keep going because if I stop, he might decide my answer was rehearsed, and I will not let him decide that. I will not let him take the truth from me just because he is scared to need it.

“Your mother,” I say, and his hand twitches inside mine. “She raised a boy who, when his grandfather started trying to become a different man at seventy-five years old, recognized the trying and stayed in the room.”

Halston’s eyes go wet.

I keep my voice low.

“That boy. The man that boy became. The man sitting on this couch telling me, on the only night he could tell me, what it costs to be him. That is the man, Liv and I love.”