Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
Livia
Now . . .
I stare at the phone in my nightstand like it might start breathing.
It doesn’t.
Which is rude, considering it has already ruined my life without so much as lighting up.
Black. New. Expensive in that silent, masculine way rich men prefer their apologies. No scratches. No fingerprints except mine. No history. Nothing in it that belongs to me except the possibility of a call I am too proud to make and too desperate not to consider.
Creed Lafontaine sent me a phone.
No. That sounds simple. Clean. Almost thoughtful.
Creed Lafontaine sent me a phone via a security company because apparently my life has reached the point where a woman in tailored black trousers can appear in my studio, place coffee on my workbench, inform me I have a bodyguard—her—and leave before I can decide whether to be grateful or mildly offended.
For the record, I chose both.
Gratitude and offense are very efficient emotions. They help me multitask.
Eleonora—my new bodyguard—arrived yesterday afternoon at the institute while I was pretending to work and doing an extraordinary impression of a woman who had not spent the night being gutted by three men, two family dynasties, and one impossible truth.
She was tall, somewhere in her thirties, dressed like a curator who knew which paintings were fake and which patrons were worse. Her Italian carried that precise Florentine edge of someone who had lived here long enough to belong without needing to perform belonging for anyone.
I hated that I liked her immediately.
I also hated that she took one look at me and seemed to know exactly how close I was to dissolving into an emotional puddle beneath my own drafting table. Which would have been unfortunate, since the institute frowns upon structural collapse in staff members before lunch.
“Byron Langdon and Fitzhenry Everhart sent me,” she said.
I blinked at her.
Fitzhenry, I knew. Byron Langdon meant nothing to me.
Then she added, “Mr. Lafontaine hired the company.”
And everything inside me went painfully still.
I stood there in my studio, surrounded by sketches, clay studies, and the sour little coffee I had forgotten to drink three hours earlier, while Creed’s name moved through the room like a hand over a bruise.
Mr. Lafontaine.
Creed.
The man who had not searched for me—or was it found? I’m now confused, still hurt, and anxious. Not a great combo.
But the point is that he wasn’t there then. Not when I was gone. Not when I had needed someone to look hard enough, long enough, fiercely enough to tear the world apart and find me in the wreckage of it.
He hadn’t.
And somehow, stupidly, humiliatingly, some part of me still hopes he’ll reach for me. Not metaphorically. I wish it were metaphorical. Metaphors are respectable.
This was worse.
This was my body hearing his name and forgetting every intelligent thing my brain had ever assembled. This was grief with muscle memory. This was heartbreak, making room for want because apparently my survival instincts had all the dignity of a raccoon in a bakery dumpster.
I missed him.
I was furious with him.
I needed him with an ache so private it felt indecent.
Eleonora didn't rush me. She held a small paper bag in one hand and a coffee in the other.
She set the coffee on my workbench. Then the bag.
“A phone,” she said. “You can call when you are ready. There is a note from Mr. Everhart inside.”
I glanced at the bag as if it might contain a snake.
Honestly, I might have preferred the snake. Snakes are direct. Snakes don't send you mysterious phones or hire people to deliver them and then remain emotionally unavailable from a distance.
“I’m your . . .” Eleonora paused, not from uncertainty, but from the faint irritation of someone forced to use a word too dramatic for the job. “Bodyguard.”
I stared at her.
She continued, “I’ll be in the building from now on. Three doors down at the trattoria during the day. At the corner across from your apartment at night. You will not see me unless you need me.”
My mouth opened before my better judgment could sprint across the room and tackle it.
“Why are you doing this?”
A very stupid question, objectively. A woman tells you she has been assigned to make sure of your safety, and you ask why, as though self-preservation is a scheduling inconvenience. As though danger should have the courtesy to submit paperwork and wait for approval.
Eleonora’s expression barely changed.
“As I said, Mr. Lafontaine hired us.”
The words lined themselves up in my head, one after another, and none of them gave me anything solid to hold. Creed hired people to watch me. Creed sent a phone. Creed believed I was in danger.
Creed, who might be back.
Too late . . . maybe.
Still on time to split me open with one ordered sentence passed through another person’s mouth.
Eleonora left the coffee. She left the bag. She closed the door behind her so quietly that the latch made no sound.
I sat at my workbench for a long time without touching either one.
Then, because I am apparently an accomplished professional woman with the emotional fortitude of wet tissue paper, I opened the bag.
Inside was a black phone and a note from Fitzhenry Everhart confirming everything Eleonora had told me. The phone is intended for personal calls only. They swept my apartment earlier, and it will be re-swept as often as needed. His initials at the bottom, neat and cold and official.
I held the phone in one hand and the note in the other.
Then I cried.
Not like a Victorian woman. Nope. I cried in the mortifying, breathless way of a woman who has been functioning on professionalism, caffeine, spite, and the misguided belief that if she can keep making lists, nothing inside her will break.
A few seconds. A few minutes. Possibly hours. Time went thin and strange around me.
It felt like being found and abandoned in the same breath.
It felt like Creed reaching for me with one hand while keeping the rest of himself locked away somewhere I had never been invited.
It felt like Halston’s silence. As if the part of me that should have been afraid of how much they both affected me, except fear had become crowded out by longing, anger, and the terrible tenderness of being protected by men who didn't know how to ask to be loved without making it look like war.
I put the note back in the bag.
I put the phone in my nightstand.
Then I spent the night pretending I would not reach for it.
Now morning presses pale and indifferent against the curtains, and I am still staring at the drawer.
The phone waits inside it.
Creed waits somewhere on the other side of that number.
And I hate myself a little for knowing that if it rang, I would answer before the second buzz.
Then I dried my face, put the phone in my bag, finished my afternoon, locked the studio, and rode Bruno home through Florence at six o'clock.
This is a new day. The phone is where I left it.
The light is grey through the curtains. Florence has not committed to the day yet. Bella, beneath my left wrist, is quiet—not the stillness of confirmation, the stillness of having slept, which is its own minor miracle.
I lie on my back and look at the ceiling.
I have a video call with Mr. Everhart in seven hours.
I have Moises, whom I have to talk to before then.
I have a husband I have not seen in ten years on the other side of an ocean and a man I once promised always who has, apparently, been searching for me for a decade and is currently waiting for me to use a phone his people sent.
Creed has people, which shouldn’t surprise me. Didn’t he mention once that his agent promised to do anything for him? Well, he didn’t do much because he never searched for me.
I get up.
In the kitchen, I make coffee. The Bialetti hisses with the small theatrical reluctance it has been hissing with for the four years I have owned it.
The plant on the windowsill leans toward the light.
The cracked tile by the sink that I have been meaning to replace for two years continues to be a small daily lesson in living with imperfection.
My phone—the regular one—buzzes on the counter.
Moises.
Buongiorno, Bellissima. I am at home. I tried not to call last night because you said you needed sleep. Are you all right? May I come over? I will bring pastries.
I look at the message for a long time.
This amazing man has been with me for three years, and I .
. . I thought he could do the one thing that nobody else has been able to do.
Fill the emptiness in my heart. I care for him so much, but I can’t love him.
God knows I’ve tried, but it’s just impossible to use your heart when it’s barely working.
What am I supposed to do? Keep going?
Maybe I have to end it today. Not because I believe I’ll go back to Creed or to my husband. No. That’s probably over. I have to do it because it’s unfair to keep the lie.
We’ll have to talk, but I can’t tell him everything. I can’t tell him about foundation fraud and what might become an investigation . . . or about my ten-year-old marriage in one morning. I can tell him some. I also need to end it so he’s not in danger.
But when do I do it?
Not today, but I can prepare him, right?
Is that even a thing? Fuck, I hate to be this woman. I’m usually an assertive, mature woman who shouldn’t be second-guessing her future. But someone is using my signature, and someone might be framing me. Also, I need to know that Hal and Creed are safe. Not today.
All that can wait a little longer.
I type back, Come over. Let me shower first. Eleven?
Eleven. I will bring sfoglie, he responds.
I laugh before texting. You always bring sfoglie.
His response makes me smile: I am consistent. It is one of my best qualities.
I shower.
The water is hot enough to feel like a small religious experience. I stand under it longer than I should, washing two days off my body—turpentine, panic, train-station coffee from yesterday morning, and the residue of a night spent in my work clothes.
I get out.
I dry off.