Page 35 of The Lies We Play

The hallway outside the boardroom is all cream walls, muted brass, and framed photographs of Saint Claire’s generosity. Ribbon cuttings. Scholarship receptions. Restored chapels. My grandfather shook hands with artists who likely hated him and cashed the checks anyway. My stepmother appears in three photographs. My father in two.

I am in one.

The caption reads: Halston W. Saint Claire Returns to Foundation Leadership.

This is from six years ago. My face is thinner. My suit is immaculate. My smile is . . . just right. But my eyes are so empty that looking at them feels indecent.

I might not remember who I was, but this man is nothing like the one before the accident. If only I could find him. If only there’s a way to dig the truth of who I was and how to get myself out of this hellhole. Who’s my family?

I walk past the elevators.

My driver is waiting downstairs. He will take me to the apartment my family prefers I use in the city, where the furniture is tasteful, and nothing has ever been misplaced. Or if I decide I’m done for the week, to the compound in Connecticut, where everyone calls the rooms by family names and no one admits they are cells if you can’t leave them without a report.

I do neither.

I take the stairs.

Thirty-one floors is excessive. Twelve is what gets done before the leg aches from the old injury, and common sense returns. By the time the elevator picks me up on the twentieth floor, I am sweating under my dress shirt, irritated by my body, and bizarrely pleased.

No one approved this.

It is fucking ridiculous that a thirty-six-year-old man rebels by taking the stairs and ignoring his driver. But this is where we are in my pathetic story.

Outside, Manhattan receives me with traffic, exhaust, and indifference. Rain threatens but has not yet committed. People move around me with umbrellas tucked under arms, phones at their ears, coffee in their hands, whole private disasters carried in well-made coats.

I start walking.

At first, there is the lie of walking to clear the head.

It is a socially acceptable lie, so it gets to live for six blocks.

It makes no difference to live another lie, does it? I can play along, I always do. I don’t know my destination, but at this point, it doesn’t matter. Maybe I’ll just never go back to the Saint Claires and lose myself in a city where nobody gives two shits.

Chapter Six

Then

Creed: Landed. It’s fifty-four degrees and overcast.

Liv: Your jacket isn’t warm enough for that, and you know it.

Creed: You’ve never seen my jacket.

Liv: I have. You wore it to the roof on Saturday. It’s a windbreaker pretending to be a coat.

Creed: Your problem with my windbreaker is noted. I have warmer jackets for inclement weather.

Liv: Define warmer.

Creed: Insulated.

Liv: That is not a definition. That is a hostage statement from a clothing catalog.

Creed: Warm enough.

Liv: Men who say “warm enough” are found frozen beside highways every winter.

Creed: I’m in Toronto, not scaling Everest.