Page 33 of The Lies We Play

“I asked for a file.”

“And you’ll have it,” Everett says, calm as a priest and twice as dangerous. “Of course you will. Perhaps not in the middle of a finance discussion.”

“This is a foundation meeting. If a foundation-funded restoration file has been placed under amended access, I consider that relevant.”

Margaret’s fingers press together. “The restriction is temporary.”

Temporary?

The word triggers something again. There’s again the couch. Yellow tabs. Orange marker. The woman’s bare foot, tucked under my thigh as if she had always known where she fit against me. A man, behind her, arm around her waist, pretending possession was casual because his pride could survive anything except wanting us where we could see it.

If only I could see their faces, recognize them. So far, they’re just a fucking figment of my imagination. The only thing that feels real in this life, and yet, the only thing that’s unreachable.

Temporary, I hear myself say.

I feel her hand on my face.

Then the pain comes. Not all at once. It spreads through me, low and brutal, something almost physical. The missing. The empty rooms in my head. The memories I can’t reach, no matter how badly my soul claws for them. The dreams that feel too real to dismiss, the fragments that might be mine or might only be grief inventing mercy because I can’t stand not knowing.

I don’t know what I’ve lost.

That is the worst part.

Not the fear. Not the confusion. Not even the ache of looking at someone and feeling my whole body reach for her before my mind understands why.

It’s the possibility that I already had this. That I already loved someone. That I already knew the exact shape of her—or maybe him—beneath me, the warmth of their palm against my cheek, the way they look at me like I am both a wound and a home they refuse to abandon.

And I can’t fucking remember.

So I hide it.

I swallow the sound trying to rise out of me and keep my face still. I let the pain stay buried where no one can touch it, even as it moves through me like something alive, grieving for a life I may have already lived and a love I may have already ruined.

I learned young that pain is another person’s property the moment it shows.

My father taught me that without ever saying the words. My grandfather perfected the lesson before that. Saint Claire men don't fall apart. We excuse ourselves, close doors, cut checks, drink too much, disappear for entire winters, then return in better suits and pretend no one noticed the seams.

That’s what happened to me.

The story goes that my alcoholism nearly killed someone, and that I’m lucky to be alive. There are so many holes in my brain—and in their version of the truth—that I can’t even argue with it properly.

Anyway, I returned to public life once my body recovered from the accident and my alcoholism was, according to them, under control. I don’t remember the binges they swear started in my late teens. There’s no record of them either. They—mostly my stepmother—tell me my record is clean because they paid for it. We have enough money to buy the press. So, every article, every photograph, and every ugly little detail that might have proved whether I was a monster or only convenient is gone.

My stepmother says I came back better than ever. She makes it sound as if I took a sabbatical from myself. As if I chose absence.

As if I woke one morning and decided to misplace my past.

Some days, I almost believe it. Maybe I did become more assertive. Less problematic. Easier to manage in public. Maybe this is what reform looks like when people with excellent lawyers and no interest in the truth have rebuilt a man.

Maybe none of that is true at all.

Who the fuck knows?

Son, a voice says inside me. That’s Cornelius’s voice. My grandfather’s voice appears usually when I doubt myself. I don’t know why he’s in my head more than any other thoughts when I get anxious—and in our secret language. That’s how I learned to speak it. I was his favorite grandchild. Probably why he left everything settled in his estate so they would take care of me. He died of sadness because I was destroying myself and had almost killed somebody. He probably didn’t trust that I could be more than . . . whoever I was before he died.

Do not sign anything, not today.

I don't know when he said it.