Page 287 of The Lies We Play

Instead of using the computer, I use the phone. I'm not ready to see his face from inside this cabin at thirty-six thousand feet. I will see his face when I have to see it. Audio is what I can hold tonight.

It rings once.

“Liv.”

His voice in my ear has the same effect it had three nights ago in my Florence kitchen. The same drops through my body. The same private recognition.

He is real.

He is a man with a voice.

I have been carrying him as a name, a couple of tattoos, and a face on a screen for ten years, and tonight he is a sound in my ear in a cabin that someone built to bring me back.

“I’m on the plane,” I say.

“They told me.”

A small silence.

He’s doing what Creed does, which is letting me say what I’m here to say at my own pace, on my own schedule, with no pressure from him.

I haven’t had that room from a man in ten years.

I had forgotten what it tastes like.

“Thank you,” I say. “For coming for me.”

There is a longer silence on his end.

Then he says, “Liv. You’ve always been the one who rescues us.”

The sentence lands in a place that has not been true in ten years. It lands in a part of me I closed off because keeping it open meant leaving a door cracked for two men I had been told to forget.

Now, in this cabin, with Creed’s voice in my ear, the door opens anyway.

A January afternoon I have not allowed myself to think about in a decade comes back as if it has been waiting in the next room the whole time.

I close my eyes.

The cabin disappears.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Creed

Then . . .

Halston comes home from his grandfather’s house at almost midnight.

I am at the kitchen island, heating up food. Liv is on the couch with a blanket and a legal pad, sitting in the specific posture she has when she has been thinking too long about something she has not yet been allowed to say out loud.

The apartment has been quiet since Halston left at noon.

He went alone. He said he needed to walk through the house one more time before anyone decided to change the locks.

I didn't like that sentence.

I liked it less when he said it as if changing the locks on a dead man’s house was normal family behavior, just another Tuesday in a bloodline where grief arrives with lawyers and inventory lists.