Page 351 of The Lies We Play

Liv says, “There’s dessert? I may never leave.”

Dad answers, “Good.”

Halston looks startled by the word.

I don’t blame him.

Some welcomes sound like traps until they keep happening.

I cross the room and take his hand where everyone can see.

Then Liv reaches for mine.

“You okay?” I ask.

She nods. “We’re getting there.”

Hal glances and nods. “Slowly, but with so much love we’ll make it.”

I look around the room—at my father, my sister, my brothers, this strange, beautiful family that keeps widening instead of asking us to shrink.

For years, we survived the lies we were forced to play.

Tonight, no one asks us to perform a version of love they can understand.

They just make room for the truth.

Epilogue

Halston

The light in this city does something nobody warned me about.

It comes in low across the rooftops at six in the evening and turns the kitchen the color of a peach left on a windowsill all afternoon. Liv has been telling me about it for four months in a way I understood to be metaphorical, and I’ve only just understood she meant it literally.

Florence is very inconvenient that way.

Beautiful without permission.

The kitchen is small.

Liv’s apartment is small. It’s in a building on a street I still can’t pronounce correctly, three flights up, with shutters that open onto a courtyard and a tiled floor. The kitchen has a clay pot of basil that Sofia brought up from the garden last week. Liv has been speaking to it in Italian as if a houseplant deserves full participation in household governance.

Creed is on the floor.

He is on the floor because Creed Lafontaine has spent forty-eight hours inside a thirty-six-hour cold, and he has decided the cool tile of Liv’s kitchen is where a retired hockey player should put himself when his sinuses have unionized against him.

He takes up most of the room.

Naturally.

I am at the small table with a coffee Liv made an hour ago that has gone cold, and a folder of paperwork from a courier who came up three flights this morning and looked at me as if I were wasting his time. I was, technically, because the paperwork inside the folder is a draft I’m going to redline and send back, and somehow I’m sure he knew that the second he handed it over.

Liv is at the stove making something that smells like garlic, rosemary, and olive oil with a name on the bottle.

Bella is at her wrist.

Bella, who has been at Liv’s wrist for ten years, has been quieter since June.