Page 310 of The Lies We Play

Then she turns slightly so she can see both of us.

“I didn’t plan for either of you,” she says.

Her voice shakes once, then finds itself.

“I had plans. Extremely detailed plans. Color-coded plans. Plans with margins and deadlines and backup plans in case the main plans had the nerve to fail me.”

A small laugh moves through me before I can stop it.

Liv looks at me, eyes wet and beautiful and furious with love.

“Then Creed came first.”

Her fingers tighten around mine.

“You were the first place I learned I could be wanted without auditioning for it. You made room for all my lists, all my panic, all my jokes that were really little fences I kept building so nobody could get too close. You got close anyway. Carefully. Patiently. As you knew, I needed time but still deserved heat.”

Liv turns to Halston.

“And you came in like a man with too many locked doors and the audacity to pretend the house wasn’t on fire.”

Halston’s mouth moves.

Almost.

“You challenged me. You irritated me. You saw every avoidance tactic I had and made notes. You made me feel safe in a way that annoyed me because I had no academic framework for it. You made love feel like something that could have structure without becoming a cage.”

She looks at both of us, and now the tears fall freely.

“I know the paper today says one thing. I know the world will see one thing. But I need both of you to hear me clearly because if I do not say this in front of the flag and the judge and the worst lighting in Manhattan, I will regret it for the rest of my life.

“I’m not choosing one of you. I have never chosen one of you. I am choosing the life that began when the three of us stopped pretending love had to arrive in a shape people already understood.”

Her voice drops.

“I choose Creed. I choose Halston. I choose us.”

She looks at Halston first.

“I vow to stand beside you when your family tries to make you feel like staying with them is the only way to matter. I vow to remind you that power is not the same as belonging. I vow to love the boy who lost too much and the man who learned to fight back.”

Then she turns to me.

“And I vow to stand beside you when the world tries to make you smaller because loving us is not convenient for your career. I vow to never let you believe the witness line is the whole story. I vow to say your name out loud in every room I am brave enough to enter, and to get braver every year until there are no rooms left.”

My control gives.

Not loudly.

Not dramatically.

One tear. Then another.

Liv sees it.

Her face nearly breaks.

“I love you both,” she says. “I loved you before I understood what we were. I loved you when we were temporary. I loved you when we were careful. I love you now, when the world is asking us to be strategic instead of romantic, and I will love you later. When strategy is over, and we are just three people at home, fighting over coffee and books and who left socks where they do not belong.”