Page 237 of The Lies We Play

The sadness in his eyes undoes me because it is not polished. It is not useful. It doesn't solve anything. It only sits there between us, honest and unbearable, a thing he can't buy, manage, or litigate into obedience.

His hand drops.

“Liv, welcome back.”

The sound my body makes is, again, not a sound.

I close the laptop before I can beg him to say it again.

The screen goes black.

My kitchen returns all at once.

The chair beneath me. The table. The cup with cold coffee. The plate with powdered sugar on its rim. My cardigan slipping from one shoulder. My left wrist is exposed, the knot looking darker than it did an hour ago, as if Creed seeing it has called the ink back to life.

I sit there for a long time.

Florence does what Florence does outside the window. Bella sleeps on my wrist. The cardigan Sofia gave me is around my shoulders. The second sfoglia, somehow, has been eaten. I don't remember eating it, which is rude of me, but emotionally consistent.

I am going to New York.

I have not yet allowed myself to know it.

I know it.

I am going back to the city where I lost them.

I am going back as Halston Saint Claire’s wife.

I am going back to stand in front of a court with a marriage certificate, a tremor, a secure phone, and the deeply inconvenient knowledge that the two men I spent ten years trying to survive are not ghosts.

They are alive.

They might be waiting for me or maybe not. This isn’t the first time I head back to the other side of the Atlantic not knowing what to expect after my absence, but hoping that they’re each in one piece.

Maybe hoping for some love even when I might be too broken and not enough.

Chapter Thirty-One

Livia

Then . . .

The flight home is seven hours and twenty-eight minutes long, and I spend most of it deciding whether the silhouettes on my left ankle will speak for themselves.

I have given them fifteen days to settle. The skin around them is still faintly pink. Not angry anymore, just new. The hawk with the hockey stick is the easy one. Creed will understand the hawk before I even explain it. He’ll probably look at it for too long, then pretend he isn’t affected, then touch it later when he thinks I’m asleep.

The key is the confession.

Hal gave us a key before any of us knew how to say home. A key to his door. To his life. To the rooms he had locked against everyone before us. I put it on my skin because some gifts are too big to carry in a pocket, and some men don't know they saved you until you show them the place where you decided to stay.

Which I have been.

Which I am.

The plane hums around me with that strange first-class hush people pay extra for, as if money can make air less recycled or time less cruel. Halston insisted on the seat. Of course he did. He used phrases like, ‘more comfortable,’ and ‘long flight,’ and ‘you need to sleep.’ Which were all technically valid and emotionally manipulative, because Halston has always been able to make care sound like logistics.

The flight attendant brings me sparkling water in an actual glass. I drink half of it and forget the rest exists.