Page 320 of The Lies We Play

Another set of footsteps comes up behind her.

Creed.

I know it is Creed before he speaks because my body knows Creed now. My body has known Creed since his thumb pressed the inside of my wrist beside the trinity knot. It knew him in the locker room. It knew him when he kissed me. It knew him before I was ready.

His voice, very low, says, “Go on. He might not recognize you, but he’ll know it’s you.”

There's a pause.

Then she steps into the kitchen.

Livia.

The first thing I understand is that photographs are cruel.

They show a face. They do not prepare you for presence.

She is small, nearly a foot shorter than me, but she takes over the room without raising her voice or moving quickly. Dark hair falling loose around her face. Eyes too bright. Mouth trembling with everything she is trying not to spill at my feet. She wears a coat she has not taken off, as if she came in too fast to remember temperature, and her hand is closed tight around the strap of a bag at her shoulder.

She looks at me.

I look at her.

For a second, the world doesn’t ask anything of us.

Then she says, “Hal.”

My name in her mouth. That’s what undoes me before I fully know her face.

Not the name itself.

The way she gives it back.

The soft breath before the H. The small drop at the end. The ache inside a single syllable. My ear remembers this. My ear has been remembering this for ten years without permission, keeping her voice somewhere my mind could not reach.

She takes one step into the kitchen.

I don’t move.

I can’t move.

I’m standing in the middle of a black-and-white tiled floor, looking at a woman whose name I know because Creed told it to me three weeks ago, and my mouth has not yet been brave enough to say it.

“Livia?”

She presses her lips together and nods.

Her eyes water.

Slowly, she walks toward me until our feet almost touch. Her face tips up. Tiny, Creed called her once, but there is nothing tiny about the force of her standing this close. She feels like a country I was exiled from and forgot how to enter.

Then I remember what I’ve been told for ten years.

What I have been told about myself.

The drinking. The recklessness. The accident. Her blood. Creed’s grief. My name attached to every horrible version of that night.

So I say, “I’m sorry.”