The Lies We Play

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Livia

Now . . .

The first thing I hear is a low mechanical beep—proof I didn’t die.

Then, a woman’s voice somewhere beyond my body. Rubber soles connecting with tile.

My own breath dragging in and out like it needs written instructions, a signature, three follow-up emails, and possibly a notarized affidavit before it can commit to the simple act of keeping me alive.

Fantastic.

Even semi-unconscious, I remain project manager of a failing department.

Then pain finds me.

Not in one grand sweep, because apparently my body has no respect for structure.

It arrives in pieces, a deeply disorganized committee of suffering. First, my ribs. Then, the shoulder, followed by my skull. Finally, my jaw. Which brings me to my mouth. It tastes like pennies, plastic, and every bad decision I have ever tried to schedule around instead of confronting.

My left hand twitches against the sheet.

I open my eyes and stare at it.

For several seconds, maybe longer, I have no idea why this random hand is in my hospital bed.

Then I realize it indeed belongs to me. That should scare me. Wait . . . actually, it does.

I tell my fingers to move again.

They do, barely.

I tell my hand to lift.

It doesn’t.

A laugh climbs out of me, ugly and panicked, except it breaks halfway through and becomes a sound pathetic enough to make someone hurry over.

“Livia?” a nurse says. “Sweetheart, can you hear me?”

Sweetheart.

I hate the tone immediately.

I don’t know why. In fact, I don’t know anything useful.

I don’t know where I am, or why my body feels like someone took me apart, lost interest halfway through reassembly, then submitted me anyway.

I only know this woman has two fingers at my wrist, her face is soft with professional concern, while the question inside me claws its way up through all the pain.

I open my mouth.

Nothing comes out.

“Don’t try to talk yet,” she says gently. “We just took the tubes out. But you’re okay.”

Tubes? Okay?

Labeled folders and matching socks are okay. A calendar invite sent with a clear agenda is okay. Knowing where your hand is without staring at it like it missed onboarding is okay.

I am definitely not okay.

I know that so clearly it almost hurts worse than my ribs.

Okay, is having a voice and . . . Where is Halston? I try to look around, but my neck hurts.

I try to ask, but nothing comes out.

I try again, and my voice scrapes out, ruined and thin.

“Hal.”

The nurse goes very still.

It’s a tiny thing. A pause. A fraction of a breath.

Most people would miss it.

I have built an entire personality around noticing what people try to hide while pretending to care about others.

“Halston,” I rasp. “Where’s Halston?”

Her face shifts into something gentle.

No.

I hate gentleness.

Gentleness is what people do right before they remove your organs with a sentence.

“Let me get the doctor.”

“No.” I try to sit up, and pain tears through my side so fast that the ceiling swims. My right hand grips the sheet. My left one lies there, twitching, uselessly decorative. “Creed. Where’s Creed? Call him. He’ll know what to do. He always does.”

There’s another pause.

Worse.

“Please,” I whisper.

The nurse says my name again, too carefully, and something inside me starts coming apart.

I want to scream. I want to sit up. I want my phone, my purse, my shoes, my men, my whole life.

Most of all, I want answers in bullet points. I want a timeline. I want a competent adult with a clipboard, a liability waiver, and a healthy fear of disappointing me.

Instead, I am trapped beneath a thin hospital blanket while my own body refuses to obey basic instructions.

My eyes burn.

I close them.

For one terrible, beautiful moment, the hospital vanishes.

And I am back in Halston’s apartment the night before.

Barefoot on the couch. Knees tucked under me. Creed’s old Juniper Ridge sweatshirt is swallowing me whole, sleeves past my wrists, collar stretched from years of him pretending he doesn’t keep sentimental things while owning a garment with more emotional history than most marriages.

I borrowed it months ago.

Halston calls it theft.

I call it mine because I am a reasonable woman with excellent boundaries and an extremely flexible definition of reasonable.

Legal papers cover the coffee table, marked with yellow tabs, blue tabs, pink tabs, and one aggressively orange tab I added at two in the morning last week when I decided betrayal deserved its own color.

Halston sits with his back against the couch, one long leg bent, the other stretched out, papers in hand.

He reads aloud in that beautiful, growly, old-money Manhattan voice of his, the one that makes even financial ruin sound as if it should be delivered beneath stained glass.

“Pursuant to the terms of the amended trust—”

“Oh my fucking God,” Creed groans from behind me. “No one who uses pursuant deserves love.”

Halston doesn’t look up. “That feels severe.”

“It’s accurate.”

I smile into my mug. “You both understand this is nonsense, right?”

Creed’s mouth brushes my shoulder.

Not quite a kiss.

Not innocent either.

With Creed, the space between those two things is where most of my dignity has gone to die.

“Good,” he murmurs. “Then tell the husband he sounds like a haunted contract.”

“My husband is trying to understand the legal structure of his inheritance.”

“Our husband,” Creed says.

The room goes quiet.

Not awkward.

Awkward is for first dates, elevator small talk, and me pretending I don’t know exactly how many emails someone has ignored before they finally reply with, “Apologies, just seeing this.”

This is different.

Halston lowers the papers.

Creed’s arm stays around my waist, his hand spread over my stomach through the sweatshirt.

He does that sometimes. Pulls me into the space he’s decided is safest: against him.

His hand settles over my stomach like he’s guarding something precious, like every protective part of him has chosen me and has no intention of letting the world forget it.

Halston’s hand rests on my ankle, thumb moving over the bone in a slow, absent pass, as if touching me helps him remain human.

The gold band on my finger catches the light from the kitchen.

Each of us has one.

We only wear them here.

No one can know we’re together.

No one can know we’re married—not yet.

This is why we’re going through all these legal papers. And yes, technically, the law allowed only. Two signatures. In this case, it’s Hal’s and mine.

But listen, the law also once thought women were property, so forgive me if I’m not taking romantic architecture advice from a system with historically bad taste.

From the beginning, we made room for three.

We chose it.

After three years, we signed what we could—promised what mattered.

Still, now and then, some old bruise inside one of us reaches for the promise just to see if it holds.

I feel Creed go still behind me.

Halston looks at him.

Creed tries to smile, but it barely gets past his mouth. That’s his tell. The almost-smile. The expensive little lie he uses when wanting something makes him feel exposed.

“You say that like you think I forgot,” Halston says.

Creed’s fingers flex once over my stomach.

“Did you?”

Oh, Creed.

My beautiful, impossible Creed, who can take a hit into the boards hard enough to make an arena go silent, then skate back to the bench with blood on his mouth and murder in his eyes.

Who can sit beneath the fluorescent locker-room lights with ice taped to half his body and still make losing look like a personal insult to his ancestors.

Who has made an art form out of control—on the ice, in front of cameras, in every clean answer he gives when reporters ask questions designed to make him bleed where no one can bandage him.

Yet love still makes him ask permission to exist.

Halston sets the papers aside.

Carefully.

As if one wrong move might send Creed out of reach.

Then Halston rises.

Creed’s hand slips from my waist.

I feel the loss instantly.

Halston steps close.

Creed looks up at him.

For a second, neither man speaks.

That is the part that ruins me. Not the kiss that I know is coming. Not even the wanting, though there is so much of it in the room I can barely breathe around it.

It is the looking.

Halston looks at Creed as if he sees every locked door inside him and knows which ones were built from fear.

Creed looks at Halston as if he would hand him anything if Halston would just promise not to leave him outside the circle.

Then Halston reaches for him.

His hand curls around the back of Creed’s neck, fingers sliding into his hair. Creed’s lashes lower, and his expression shifts so fast it hurts to witness. The arrogance falls away. The control. The gleaming, public version of him.

What remains is the man who crawled into bed between us last week at three in the morning after a road trip from hell, without a word. Just Creed pushing his face into my hair while Halston lay one hand between his shoulders, as if touch was the only language Creed could accept without flinching.

Halston bends.

“Never,” he says.

Then he kisses him.

Not hard at first.

That would be easier for both of them.

No, Halston kisses Creed as if he is answering a question Creed was too proud to ask twice.

As if he is putting the word ours directly into Creed’s mouth.

His fingers tighten at Creed’s nape, and Creed makes this low, wrecked sound he would deny under oath and possibly litigate if I mentioned it at brunch.

I stop breathing.

Creed’s hand finds my knee without looking. His palm closes there, holding on to me while Halston kisses him deeper, while Creed gives in by degrees, all that brutal self-control turning molten in our living room.

Halston tilts Creed’s head back.

Creed lets him.

That part gets me every time.

Creed, who can take pain with a smile cruel enough to scare grown men.

Creed, who can bleed and call it inconvenient.

Creed, who has built a religion out of pride.

With Halston, he yields like it costs him everything.

With me, he pretends it costs him nothing.