Page 232 of The Lies We Play

He breaks off, staring at the screen.

“Liv. I tried. I'm not telling you that to make you feel I deserve forgiveness. I am telling you because you deserve to know that someone was looking. Someone was hoping. Someone was waiting—and loved you while you were gone.”

I am crying before I understand I have started.

One tear slips down my face, then another, hot and humiliating. My mouth trembles. My breath catches wrong, stutters, returns in small broken pulls I can't organize. I press my palm over my lips, but it does nothing. The sound comes anyway.

A sob.

Ugly. Raw. The opposite of the tasteful grief I would prefer to present on a video call with the man I have loved, hated, missed, blamed, mourned, and apparently had been wrong about in ways I don't yet know how to forgive.

“Mom told me you never came,” I confess, each word dragged through me. “No one called. She said no one looked.”

Creed leans closer to the screen.

Not enough.

Too far.

A whole ocean between us, and I have never hated geography more.

“Baby,” he says, and this time the endearment doesn't break me.

It gathers me.

Not enough to fix anything.

Enough to make me hear him.

“I would’ve torn the world apart if I had known where to start.” His voice drops, ruined and controlled all at once. “I’m so sorry they made you believe I didn’t.”

“Creed.”

“Yeah.”

“Show me your wrist.”

He blinks.

For one second, he is not the controlled man in the expensive kitchen with the careful voice and the resources to move people across continents. He is twenty-six again. Mine. Hal’s. Ours. Looking at me from across a room as if one sentence from me can rearrange the structure of his life.

Then he understands.

His hand moves slowly, almost reverently. He pulls back the sleeve of his shirt and turns his left wrist toward the camera.

The Celtic knot is there.

Dark against his skin. Slightly smaller than I remember, the lines softened by time but unmistakable. Three loops folding into each other. No beginning. No end. No space where one could be removed without ruining the whole design.

My body remembers before I do.

The tattoo chair. The smell of antiseptic. Hal pretending not to be nervous with the tragic dignity of a man facing either death or a needle the size of an eyelash. Creed teasing him. Me going first because I had, at the time, confused bravery with being the smallest idiot in the room.

My hand shakes when I pull back the sleeve of my cardigan.

Bella wakes, then quiets again, as if even she knows to behave in this moment.

I turn my wrist toward the camera.