Chapter 12 #3
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?”
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.
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.
I press my hand over my eyes.
“Creed.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know who to trust.”
“Then start with me.”
The answer leaves my mouth before strategy can improve it.
I should say, lawyer. I should say write everything down. I should say: don't call me from a traceable line; don't go back to sleep; don't speak to Everett, Margaret, your stepmother, anyone with the Saint Claire name; or a key to your medication cabinet. I should say a thousand useful things.
He breathes.
In.
Out.
Then, “But they said I was drunk.”
My hand closes around the quarter so hard the ridges bite into my palm.
“No.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know you.”
“I don’t know me.”
The sentence comes apart at the end.
For a moment, I am back in that apartment.
Legal pads on the table. Livia in my sweatshirt.
Halston looked at me with the kind of tenderness that—no.
No. Halston looked at me with a tenderness that made me want to run and stay until death.
I remember his hand on my neck. I remember the way he said ‘never.’ I remember trusting that word like an idiot because some part of me thought love, once named, became indestructible.
I swallow.
“You weren’t drunk, Hal.”
“How do you—”
“Because I would know, babe. I would’ve known, and I would’ve helped you,” I assure him. “I knew the man I love better than I knew myself.”
There is a beat. He is doing math on the other end.
Working out what I would know means. He has not quite arrived at it because we lived together, because you would have told me.
After all we were three people in a kitchen with legal pads and tab colors and you don't drive drunk past the people who love you. He is not there yet.
But his body knows. His body has been knowing.
“You’re going to write this down,” I say. “Everything you remember. Everything they told you. Everything that feels wrong.”
“I have been.”
Of course, he has.