Page 281 of The Lies We Play

“And I was not sure I could open mine either.”

“Moi—”

“No.” He shakes his head. “I'm not telling you this to make you feel guilty. I am telling you because I don't want you to leave thinking you broke something in me that you did not break. You did not break me. You let me stand close. You gave me coffee. You gave me Saturdays. You were honest about the door in every way except the words.”

I don’t respond.

I can’t

Bella has gone still under my hand, which is what she does only when something has moved past tremor into a place my body can't register properly.

After what might be a minute or might be five, I say, “I am sorry.”

He shakes his head. “Don’t. Don’t be sorry. We tried. At some point, I hoped I would be enough, or you would be enough, or that trying would become the same as being happy.”

His mouth curves in a sad, tired way.

“That isn’t how it works, is it? We can't force love in or out of ourselves.”

I look at the pastry bag because looking at him feels invasive now. As if grief should be given privacy even when it is being handed to you.

“I’m happy that you can go back to him,” he says.

It breaks my heart that he can't go back to anyone.

There is no one waiting on the other side of this conversation to catch him. No wife. No child. No life interrupted and preserved somewhere, ready to resume if he is brave enough to board a plane.

I don't even know what is waiting for me.

Maybe nothing.

Maybe this is a trip where I help save Hal, and Creed gets closure. Maybe I’ll get closure. Maybe the men I have loved for ten years have become people who can only love the woman I used to be or love someone else.

Maybe I am about to cross an ocean for a memory that will not know what to do with my face.

I don't know what happens next.

I don't know if I am coming back to Florence. I don't know if I am coming back to the institute. I don't know what is on the other side of this.

I am thirty-two years old, and I have not known what is on the other side of anything since I was twenty-two.

Tonight, I may have to walk toward something I was told for ten years didn't exist.

I think about Creed’s voice three nights ago, low and broken and reaching for me through a decade of silence.

I think about a man on the other side of an ocean whose name my mouth still can't say in this kitchen. A man whose face I have seen in photographs, I told myself, I was not searching for. A man whose body my body has been remembering against every other body I allowed near mine for ten years.

Hal.

I don't say it.

But I feel the name move through me.

After a long silence, Moises says, “I hope you’re happy.”

It is the most generous sentence a man can hand a woman who is leaving him.

“Moises—”