Page 80 of The Lies We Play

The question is out before I can kill it.

I hate myself for asking.

Halston’s breath stops.

For one second, the line becomes the whole world.

Then he says, “My body does.”

I press the heel of my hand against my eyes.

Not enough.

Too much. It’s kind of perfect in a strange way.

“Okay,” I manage.

“It knows before I do,” he says, the words coming uneven now, like once he has started speaking, something in him can’t stop. “I saw you on a screen. Hockey. I didn’t know why I knew you. I knew your neck. Your mouth. I knew—” He breaks off.

I can’t breathe.

I don’t tell him that.

“What else?” I ask.

“Her.”

Everything in me goes still.

“Livia?”

He makes a sound. Wrecked. Relieved. Terrified.

“You know her?”

I laugh once.

It comes out wrong.

“Yeah, Hal. I know her.”

“I like that name,” he says, like he just discovered how to breathe—and the air came out shaped like a word he chose. “Livia.”

“It’s beautiful, just like her.”

“Where is she?”

I look toward the dark window.

Rain moves down the glass.

“I don’t know.” My voice comes out wretched. “They took her away from me too.”

I have to breathe through what comes next. Through the way, it costs me to say the rest of it.

“I couldn’t find her, Hal.”

I expect him to push back. To ask why. To ask what I did to find her, what I tried, what I gave up. He has the right to ask. He has the right to be furious.