Chapter 30 #3
“When I asked if you had called . . .” My voice fails. I hate that it fails. I hate that I sound small. “She swore no one had looked for me, tried to convince me that I had never met you—or that Hal and I weren’t married.”
Creed looks directly into the camera.
“I’m sorry, baby, but she lied to you.”
He says it calmly.
Too calmly.
I can see the effort in his face. The way he is holding himself together because if he stops, something violent and grieving might come out.
“The first month, your mother told me you were in upstate New York and not taking visitors. I went there. I stood outside the clinic.” He sighs.
“Someone finally took pity on me and told me you weren’t a patient there.
It happened several times. At some point, she changed her number.
Your parents moved from your old house. I hired private investigators.
One of them found a clinic in Switzerland with your name on a transfer ledger.
You had been a patient for a couple of years before we could reach you. ”
My pulse bangs so hard I feel it in my teeth.
“I went to Zurich,” he says. “I stood outside that building. They wouldn’t disclose shit, but Fitz was able to figure out that you had been there for four months. After that, there was no trace of you. It was like you disappeared.”
I shake my head, but it feels detached from the rest of me.
“I wasn’t hiding.”
“I know.” His voice cracks on those two words, almost too quietly to catch. “At some point, I believed you were dead, Liv. That the Saint Claire’s had killed you because I didn’t stop looking—even after all the threats.”
The room blurs.
Not entirely. Just at the edges, like my body is trying to protect me and doing a very poor job because it has always been overcommitted and underqualified.
Creed looks at me as if he can't believe I am here.
As if luck has walked into his life with my face, and he doesn't trust it not to leave again.
“Someone was trying to make sure I wouldn’t find you,” he says.
He stops.
“Creed.”
“I never stopped looking.” The words come fast now, almost pleading. “I looked, and I tried to live while I searched and hoped and—”
He breaks off, staring at the screen.
“Liv. I tried. I'm not telling you that to make you feel I deserve forgiveness. I am telling you because you deserve to know that someone was looking. Someone was hoping. Someone was waiting—and loved you while you were gone.”
I am crying before I understand I have started.
One tear slips down my face, then another, hot and humiliating. My mouth trembles. My breath catches wrong, stutters, returns in small broken pulls I can't organize. I press my palm over my lips, but it does nothing. The sound comes anyway.
A sob.
Ugly. Raw. The opposite of the tasteful grief I would prefer to present on a video call with the man I have loved, hated, missed, blamed, mourned, and apparently had been wrong about in ways I don't yet know how to forgive.
“Mom told me you never came,” I confess, each word dragged through me. “No one called. She said no one looked.”
Creed leans closer to the screen.
Not enough.
Too far.
A whole ocean between us, and I have never hated geography more.
“Baby,” he says, and this time the endearment doesn't break me.
It gathers me.
Not enough to fix anything.
Enough to make me hear him.
“I would’ve torn the world apart if I had known where to start.” His voice drops, ruined and controlled all at once. “I’m so sorry they made you believe I didn’t.”
“Creed.”
“Yeah.”
“Show me your wrist.”
He blinks.
For one second, he is not the controlled man in the expensive kitchen with the careful voice and the resources to move people across continents. He is twenty-six again. Mine. Hal’s. Ours. Looking at me from across a room as if one sentence from me can rearrange the structure of his life.
Then he understands.
His hand moves slowly, almost reverently. He pulls back the sleeve of his shirt and turns his left wrist toward the camera.
The Celtic knot is there.
Dark against his skin. Slightly smaller than I remember, the lines softened by time but unmistakable. Three loops folding into each other. No beginning. No end. No space where one could be removed without ruining the whole design.
My body remembers before I do.
The tattoo chair. The smell of antiseptic. Hal pretending not to be nervous with the tragic dignity of a man facing either death or a needle the size of an eyelash. Creed teasing him. Me going first because I had, at the time, confused bravery with being the smallest idiot in the room.
My hand shakes when I pull back the sleeve of my cardigan.
Bella wakes, then quiets again, as if even she knows to behave in this moment.
I turn my wrist toward the camera.
The same knot.
The same wrist.
For a long moment, we hold them up to each other like proof.
This is something older and far less polite.
Ink beneath skin.
Choice beneath fear.
Love beneath all the years people tried to bury it.
Creed stares at my wrist, and his face changes in increments so small another person might miss them. I don't. His mouth parts. His eyes go bright. His jaw tightens, then releases, as if he has been bracing against this exact sight for ten years and still was not ready.
Neither am I.
Which is rude, honestly. I would have appreciated a calendar invite from my nervous system. Saturday: emotional annihilation, dress comfortably.
“We did that two days before the wedding,” he says. His voice is low, almost absent of air. “That afternoon at the place in the East Village.”
“Yes.”
“You went first because Hal was nervous. He wanted to see you do it before he sat down.”
I laugh.
It comes out wet and broken, but it is still a laugh.
“He was so dramatic about it,” I recall.
“He said pain didn’t bother him.”
“He lied.”
Creed’s mouth curves.
“He didn’t like that the guy kept looking at you,” Creed says.
Of course. Halston Saint Claire, allegedly terrified of needles, still capable of detecting a man admiring me from three feet away while pretending to be above primitive human emotion.
“He told me he was assessing the room,” I say.
“He was jealous.”
“He was always jealous.”
“So were you.” He says.
“I was reasonable.”
Creed gives me a look through the screen.
Fine.
I was not reasonable. I once rearranged an entire dinner seating chart because a woman from Hal’s charity board kept touching his arm, and I did it with a smile, a pencil, and the moral certainty of a dictator with excellent penmanship.
I hushed hockey fans away from Creed with the authority of a bodyguard.
Creed used to love that about me.
Hal used to pretend he didn’t.
I lower my wrist, but my fingers stay over the tattoo. The skin there is warm now. Alive in a way it has not felt in years.
“Do you think he still has it?” I ask.
Creed’s smile fades into something unbearably tender.
“He does,” he says. “He asked about it. Didn’t know what it meant, but had the feeling it was important.”
The room tilts quietly around me.
Hal asked about it.
Some part of him remembered the ink.
Some part of him reached for the mark we chose together.
The three of us.
I press my knuckles to my mouth, but the sound still comes. Smaller this time. More wounded than loud.
For ten years, grief taught me to live with absence as if it were a tenant I could not evict. It sat at my table. Slept beside me. Followed me through museum corridors and grocery stores and quiet mornings when my body woke before my mind and reached for men who weren't there.
Now loss has changed shape.
It has a plan.
A husband with amnesia, and my Creed.
Creed on my screen, watching me fall apart with the agony of a man who wants to catch me and can't.
I want to be angry at him.
I am angry at him.
But beneath the anger is something alive and unbearable. Something that has been breathing in the dark for a decade, waiting for one small, impossible fact to prove it was not foolish for surviving.
“Creed.”
“Yeah?”
“How is he?” My voice trembles. I hate that it does. I keep going anyway because dignity has never rescued anyone from the Saint Claires. “How is he really?”
Creed looks down for a moment.
When he looks back, the polish is still there, but it has cracks in it now. Hairline fractures. A man with too much control trying to speak about someone who makes control useless.
“He is recovering on the wrong clock,” he says. “His mind has been told to forget what mattered to him.”
My fingers curl around my wrist.
“He cried,” Creed adds, and the words hurt him. I can see it. “It’s—”
He stops. Swallows. Looks past the camera as if checking himself before he says too much or not enough.