Page 61 of The Lies We Play

Hal’s hands.

The brutal silence after.

A man who almost died and rebuilt himself into someone I no longer have the right to touch. Another who walked away as if leaving didn’t carve the room in half. Then me, tucked on the other side of an ocean like a difficult heirloom no one knew how to display. Safer there. Quieter there. Less likely to make anyone confront the fact that I used to belong to them, and now I belong mostly to appointments, translations, work emails, and a tremor with excellent timing.

I learned how to live without them here.

Not beautifully. Not bravely. Please. I'm not a woman in a perfume commercial walking along the Arno in silk, healed by architecture and flattering wind. I learned in ugly little increments. I learned by buying one fork, one knife, and one spoon because I only needed one set. By standing in pharmacies with my phone in my good hand, translating instructions while pretending I was not terrified of misunderstanding something important.

By rehearsing sentences before appointments because needing help in another language made every ordinary task feel like proof that I had become smaller. By figuring out which cafés didn’t mind if I sat too long over a cappuccino and pretended I was reading when really I was teaching myself not to look at the door to the past.

I learned by becoming useful.

Useful is safer than love. Useful gets invited into rooms without anyone asking what it wants. Useful knows schedules, names, allergies, train times, donor histories, museum contacts, seating charts, crisis protocols, which ambassador’s wife refuses lilies, and how to verbally remove a man’s spine while smiling as though I am offering him sparkling water.

Useful doesn't wake up from dreams with Creed’s voice under her skin.

Useful doesn't remember the way Halston used to watch the world, like it might put its hands on me and learn, too late, what a mistake that would be.

Useful doesn't miss being wanted by two men who were never gentle with themselves, only with me.

Bella trembles harder.

I press my palm flat against my stomach, as if I can quiet her by force, as if anything in me has ever responded well to being told to behave.

“Don’t start,” I say, but my voice comes out too thin.

The apartment answers with its morning sounds. Pipes knocking in the wall. A neighbor’s window opening. A woman laughing somewhere below, bright and careless and impossible to resent, although I do give it a respectable attempt.

I swing my feet to the floor. The tile is cool beneath my soles. My body complains immediately, because apparently, thirty seconds of emotional distress now requires a full committee review. I sit there in the pale beginning of the day, one hand trembling, one hand gripping the mattress, trying to breathe around the fact that my heart has woken before I was ready for it.

Creed’s voice shouldn’t still undo me.

Halston’s absence shouldn’t feel like a hand at the back of my neck.

I shouldn’t be the woman they left behind.

Except . . . I am.

I am also the woman who learned how to get up anyway. Who built a life out of fragments and stubbornness and color-coded calendars. Who became so competent that no one thought to ask if competence was just grief wearing lipstick and sensible shoes.

I stand.

Bella comes with me because, of course, she does. Loyal, irritating little bitch.

“Fine,” I tell Bella, walking toward the bathroom. “But we are not crying before espresso.”

The mirror catches me before I can avoid it.

Rude of her.

There I am. Hair in a sleep-tangled knot. Pillow crease stamped into one cheek. Eyes too bright, too awake, too full of men I have no business dreaming about before sunrise. I look like a woman who has spent years convincing herself she is fine, only to have the audacity to be betrayed by my sleep.

Honestly, rude feels insufficient.

I grip the edge of the sink and stare myself down as if I am a hostile witness and also the lead attorney, which feels sufficient until I remember I'm not licensed to practice law, only an exercise in emotional avoidance with a minor in self-sabotage.

Florence glows behind me in the small bathroom window, all honeyed stone and impossible beauty, as if the city has never once cared that I came here to disappear. As if it didn’t hold me through the worst of it anyway.