Page 78 of The Lies We Play

“Okay,” I say. “Then don’t.”

His breath shakes.

“How do I know you?”

The question startles me.

It shouldn’t.

It’s the right question. It’s the only question. He has been awake ten years inside a story written by the people who tried to murder him. What does he have, really, against that story but a stranger on a phone using a name he doesn't remember choosing?

Still.

It guts me.

“You don’t remember me?” I have to ask.

He scoffs. The sound is small and exhausted, almost ashamed of itself.

“I remember the version of myself they told me,” he says. “I’m a recovering alcoholic. I almost killed a woman one night a long time ago. I drove drunk, and we crashed and she was—she was hurt very badly, but she lived, and the family paid for everything, and I have been doing the work ever since. I’m doing the steps. I have been clean for ten years. I—I am very disciplined about it, Creed, you should know that. I don’t drink. I don’t take painkillers. I have rebuilt my life. The family is proud of how far I’ve come.”

He says the whole thing in one breath, like a recitation. As if he needs me to believe him more than his family. As if he’s praying, but he doesn’t believe in it, but still knows the words to.

I can't speak.

For a second, I can't speak at all.

Because the story he is offering me as evidence that something is wrong. The way he says the family is proud of how far I’ve come—flat, practiced, the words of a man who has heard his own redemption narrated to him at every dinner table for a decade. He is performing it for me on a phone. He is showing me the cage he lives in by highlighting the bars.

I stare at the dark window.

Rain moves down the glass.

Somewhere in this city, in a room I can't see, Halston Saint Claire is sitting in the dark holding a phone and reciting his own reform to a man he doesn't remember loving, because reciting is the only language he has left for what was done to him.

I want to put a fist through a wall.

I don't.

I close my eyes.

“Halston,” I say, and my voice is softer than I knew it could still go. “They’re lying to you.”

Nothing.

“You’re nothing like the Saint Claires.”

The silence on the line changes shape.

Not denial.

Not acceptance.

Recognition.

“Then who am I?” he asks.

There it is. The question I can't answer for him in one phone call. The question that is going to take months. Maybe years. Maybe the rest of all our lives, depending on how much of him survived the curating.