Page 79 of The Lies We Play

I press my thumb to the quarter on the counter.

“I could come to you,” I say.

“They’ll drag me to rehab if they think something is wrong.” His voice has gone tight. “They do it when I’m not performing as they expect.”

“You’re a free man —”

He scoffs. “I’m under the conservatorship of the Saint Claire estate.”

He says it fast. The way you say a thing you’ve been told for so long, you no longer hear how monstrous it sounds.

“Fuck, I knew something had to be wrong,” I say under my breath.

The line goes quiet again.

That silence has a shape I remember.

Halston waiting to see if permission is real.

I sit on the nearest stool because my legs are done pretending. The quarter is still in my hand. I don’t know when I picked it up again. I set it on the counter and press two fingers over it to keep from reaching through a phone like that is a thing a man can do if he wants it badly enough.

Another breath.

“I’ll wait until you tell me I can come,” I say. Because if I have waited ten years, I can wait a lifetime for him—and for her, if I can ever find her.

“You’d wait?”

The question almost takes me out.

Would I wait?

I have done nothing else for ten years.

Not cleanly. Not nobly. Not in a way anyone would call faithful if they could see the inside of it. I lived. I played. I fucked a few people who meant nothing because meaning was a country I’d been deported from. I gave interviews. I showed up. I won games. I let my family think I was emotionally constipated because it was kinder than telling them my whole life had become a room with two missing doors.

Would I wait?

“Yeah,” I say. “I’d wait a lifetime.”

A sound moves through the line. Not a sob. Halston would hate if I called it that, even inside my head. It is the sound of a man hearing the floor creak.

“I can’t remember anything, Creed,” he says.

I bow my head.

Livia should be here.

The thought cuts so hard I almost make a sound.

She should be here because Halston’s voice belongs in her hands too. Because if he is breaking open, she has the right to know. Whatever happened took all three of us, and I have spent a decade letting the world convince me that my grief was unofficial. Hers never was. His never was.

Mine sat outside the paperwork and learned to be quiet.

“What don’t you remember?” I ask.

A bitter laugh. Barely there. “Enough.”

“Do you remember me?”