Page 81 of The Lies We Play

He doesn’t.

He just makes a small sound, and I understand, with a clarity that almost knocks me off the stool, that he is not surprised. I bet some part of him already knew the answer. Some part of him has known for years that whatever happened to him also happened to her, that the same hands that wrote his story wrote the loss of her into it. He hasn’t worked out the details. But the architecture is there, in his body. He recognized it the second I said I couldn’t find her.

He is quiet long enough that I know the name hurts him.

“She’s alive?” he asks.

The words are small.

Not weak. Never that.

Small because there is no room in him for the size of the hope.

“Yes.”

Another silence.

This one almost kills me.

“She left?”

I close my eyes.

There it is.

The knife, none of us ever learned how to put down.

“No, Hal.”

I have to make my voice work for this.

“No. I don’t think she did.”

I take a breath. I have to be careful here. I have spent a decade believing the worst possible version of what happened to her—that her family took her, that no one told her where she was, that she was as alone in whatever country they put her in as I was in this apartment.

I have no proof of any of it.

I have only the body’s old certainty that the woman who looked at me on the morning of their wedding—the way Livia Crane looked at me—didn't vanish willingly.

But Halston is on the other end of a line, holding himself together with the only piece of permission he has been given in ten years, and I’m not going to give him a theory.

I’m going to give him what I know.

“I think they took her, Hal. The same way they took you. I don’t know where she is. I haven’t found her. I tried—I tried for years. I couldn’t get past her family. They had her under medical privacy; her mother wouldn’t take my calls, and the address they gave me was a clinic that didn’t have her as a patient by the time I got there. Then the threats started on my end, and I had to stop looking the way I had been looking. Though I never really stopped. I just—I had to be quieter about it. For her. For you. For⁠—”

I have to stop.

I am giving him too much. Too fast. He has been awake for one phone call, and I am unloading ten years of failure into his ear because I can't stand for him to think she walked away.

“She didn't leave,” I say. “I would bet my life on that.”

A long silence.

“Okay, Creed,” he says. Quiet. So careful is almost painful. “Okay.”

He believes me.

I don't deserve that. I didn't earn it on a phone call. He is giving it to me because some piece of him remembers what my voice sounds like when it’s telling the truth, and his body is doing the believing for him.