Page 318 of The Lies We Play
“I know.”
The tears come harder then.
It’s not pretty.
I cry for my mother trading truth for my life. I cry for my father, collecting absences at a desk in a house I never saw. I cry for Creed. For Halston. For ten years of wrong answers. For all the love that tried to protect me and still left me alone.
Creed doesn’t tell me to stop.
He doesn’t try to make it clean.
He stays on his knees with one hand on my leg and the other wrapped around the edge of the chair, as if the room decides to split open beneath me, he plans to hold the furniture in place by force.
When I can breathe again, he asks, “Do you want to take it with us?”
“All of it.”
“Okay.”
His phone vibrates against his chest.
He looks at the screen.
His face changes.
He answers. “Yeah?”
A pause, then, “Yes, we’ll get in the car with the bodyguards. You’ll drive mine to my place.”
He ends the call.
“What happened?” I ask.
“They want us in the safe house.”
“Hal—”
“Already in motion. He’ll meet us there.”
“Creed—”
“It’s a precaution,” he says.
I look at the folder in my lap.
At my father’s handwriting.
At the evidence he spent years building because he loved me too much and trusted the world too little.
A precaution.
That word has ruined whole lives in this story.
Creed sees my face.
He softens, but he doesn’t lie.
“We’ll be okay,” he says.
