Page 323 of The Lies We Play

She doesn’t stop.

“I see the man who used to stand in doorways and pretend he wasn’t waiting for us. I see the man who learned Creed’s schedule better than his own because loving him meant knowing where he was. I see the man who held my hand when I was terrified and made it feel like I had permission to stay. I see you, Hal. Not the Saint Claire version. Not the version they built to survive them. You.”

Creed’s hand tightens once on my neck.

“We’ll get through this,” he says. “We’ll figure out a way.”

“Do you have to go after?” I ask Livia. “Go back to your life?”

The question comes out before pride can stop it.

Creed said we would have to let her go if she had found happiness somewhere else. He said she deserved that. He was right. He is usually right when it costs him.

But she is standing in front of me with her hand on my chest, and I do not know how to let her leave.

I have let Creed go because I know he will come back.

Now even that certainty feels fragile.

Something inside me wants them both close enough to count by touch, as if I could protect them when I do not even know who I was or who I can become.

“We’re not going anywhere,” Livia says into my chest. “You’re our husband.”

I say, “I⁠—”

“You don’t have to remember.”

“Liv.”

She lifts her head.

She is looking at me with the face of a woman who has just been given back a syllable she thought she would never hear again. Her eyes are too bright. Her mouth has gone soft and uncertain and triumphant all at once.

She doesn’t say ‘you said my name.’

She doesn’t have to.

The room has said it for her.

Instead, she says, “Hi, husband.”

I say, “Hi.”

Creed, behind her, makes a sound that is not language.

His forehead comes to rest against the back of Livia’s head.

The three of us are touching. My chest, her hand. Her forehead, my sternum. His forehead, her hair. His hand, my neck. There is no part of any of us that is not connected to at least one of the other two.

I don’t know what to do.

I don’t have to do anything.

Then Liv says, “Hal. Look at me.”

Her voice changes.

Still gentle.