Chapter 40
Chapter Forty
Livia
Now . . .
The pilot announces that we’re about to descend in twenty minutes.
I look out the window.
There is no city below me. No skyline. No dramatic glitter of Manhattan announcing itself like a promise I’m not sure I’m allowed to believe in.
There is only a strip of dark with edge lights along it, a few buildings the size of warehouses, and a stretch of nothing where Long Island has agreed to keep its mouth shut about who lands here.
Bella is awake against the seat belt strap at my left wrist.
She has been awake since we cleared Italian airspace. She tremored through the Atlantic the way she does when emotion becomes too large for my body to contain, and then, about an hour ago, she went still.
The stillness has been worse than the tremor.
I have not been with Creed Lafontaine in ten years. I don’t know what to expect.
The plane drops, slow and clean. Finnegan brings it in like he has done this on a strip of dark a hundred times, which he probably has.
The wheels touch so smoothly my body realizes we have landed before my mind does.
The cabin shifts. The engines change to the lower tone, which means motion has ended and whatever comes next no longer belongs to the sky.
“Welcome home, Ms. Crane,” Finnegan says through the cabin speaker.
He says it like a man who knows exactly what the word home will do to me and is giving me one private second to feel it before I have to walk into it.
I press the heel of my hand to one eye, then the other, and breathe through my nose until the cabin stops tilting inside me. Bella tremors once at my wrist—a small, here-we-go tremor—and then settles.
The cabin door opens.
The night comes in cold and damp, carrying New York with it. Fuel. Asphalt. Salt grass at the edge of the field. November in the Northeast. Air that doesn't care how long I have been gone.
I unbuckle.
I stand.
The cabin steward—a woman Finnegan introduced as Lola, brisk and unsentimental—has my coat in her hands before I take a step. She helps me into it. She hands me my bag. She walks me to the door.
“Three steps down,” she says. “Watch the second one. It’s a little short.”
“Thank you.”
“Welcome back.”
I have to stop in the doorway for one second.
Creed is standing on the tarmac about ten feet from the plane, hands in the pockets of a black coat.
He is bigger than I remember.
That is the first thing.
The second is worse.
He is looking up at the doorway of the plane like he has been standing in this exact spot for ten years, waiting for a door to open and give him back the part of his life that vanished.
My vision blurs.
The tarmac lights frame him in a pale wash I don't trust myself to interpret.
He is older. Of course he is. Time has touched his face the way it touches men who have survived themselves and kept going.
There are lines at the corners of his eyes now.
His shoulders look broader under the coat. His mouth is still the same mouth.
That is what undoes me.
The mouth.
The memory of it before the rest of me can prepare.
I take the first step.
Then the second.
Then the third, the short one, and my foot finds the asphalt of a country I haven’t stood in for ten years. The cold comes through the sole of my shoe. Bella tremors hard at my wrist.
Then stops.
I walk toward him.
He walks toward me.
We stop with only a breath between us.
I look at him.
He looks at me.
Neither of us speaks.
There is a moment I have read about in books and dismissed as fiction, because writers can’t bear the plain truth that recognition is usually small. I am here to tell you it’s not a lie.
Recognition can be enormous. It can fold ten years into the space between two faces and put a woman back inside a body she has been living beside for a decade.
His eyes move once, from the top of my head to my chin.
Then he says, “Hi, baby.”
I melt.
There is no more dignified word for it. I melt into a soft, ruined version of myself because that greeting has always done this to me. That low voice, warm and worn at the edges, the baritone that used to find me in crowded rooms and make my knees question their professional obligations.
My legs actually wobble.
Creed notices.
Of course, he notices.
“I’m okay,” I say, before he can ask.
His mouth almost smiles. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Your face did.”
“My face is innocent.”
“Your face has never been innocent.”
There.
A small bridge.
A little piece of us that’s still intact enough to cross.
I say, “Hi.”
“You’re shorter than I remember.”
“I’m exactly the same height.”
“You were taller in my head.”
“In your head, I was a foot taller and made of bronze.”
“Titanium and diamonds and anything indestructible,” he corrects me.
His mouth almost smiles.
Mine does the same.
Then he takes one hand out of his pocket.
He doesn’t reach for me. He only lets the hand exist between us at his side, palm half-open, the trinity knot on the inside of his wrist exposed where the coat sleeve has ridden up.
The sight of it hits harder than I expect.
Ten years, and it is still there.
Ink under skin.
Proof I didn’t dream every promise we were too young to survive.
I touch it.
Just the tattoo. Just the inside of his wrist, two fingers where the line of the knot meets the softer skin under his palm.
Creed goes very still.
“It’s still there,” I say.
His voice changes. “It’s been there the whole time.”
He turns his hand so mine rests inside it.
Not a grip.
Not quite a hold.
His palm beneath mine. The tattoo under my fingertips. His thumb finds the inside of my wrist, where my own knot lives, and presses there once.
He doesn’t look down.
He doesn’t have to.
He has had this knot memorized since he was twenty-five.
Bella doesn’t tremble.
Bella, who trembled across the Atlantic, who trembles when I have to speak Italian to the institute switchboard, who trembles when Sofia tells me a tomato sauce has not been cooking long enough, goes completely still under his thumb.
Creed’s eyes lift.
“There you are,” he says, opening his arms.
I have not heard those words in his voice in ten years.
I step into him.
His arms come around me.
He is warm through the coat. He is solid in the way men become solid after a lifetime of impact, not for display but for use.
Built to absorb and remain. His chin tucks against the top of my head.
One hand flattens at the small of my back.
The other rises and settles, very carefully, on the back of my neck under my hair.
He holds me like he remembers exactly where I broke.
I close my eyes against his collar and breathe him in. Clean cotton. Cold air. The particular soap he has used since he was twenty-two. Beneath that, Creed. Not a young Creed. Not memory Creed. This Creed. Older. Here. Breathing above me on a tarmac in November while the plane cools down behind us.
“I have you,” he says into my hair.
“I know.”
“Liv.”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to kiss you in about four seconds. I want you to stop me if I’m overstepping a boundary.”
“Okay.”
“You can say no.”
“I’m not going to say no.”
“You can change your mind right up until my mouth is on yours.”
“I’m not going to change my mind.”
“Alright.”
He waits the full four seconds.
He waits on them on purpose because Creed has always waited on purpose, because Creed has never taken something he was not given completely.
The four seconds are him handing me the choice.
The four seconds are him saying, ‘If you need a different shape for the next ten years, this is your last clean exit.’
I don’t take it.
At four seconds, his mouth finds mine.
It is the kiss of a man who has been holding his breath for ten years and has finally been told he can exhale.
His mouth is soft.
His hand at the back of my neck doesn't move.
He doesn't push.
He doesn't deepen.
He kisses me the way a man kisses someone he is afraid will disappear if he wants too much too soon. Carefully. Then carefully again. Then, when he realizes I am still here, a third time with his forehead pressed against mine, and his eyes closed.
My hands curl into his coat.
I should say something.
I can’t.
The kiss doesn’t make me feel young. It makes me feel found.
When he pulls back, his eyes are wet.
So are mine.
“There you are,” he says again.
“I came back.”
“You came back.”
“Hal?”
His face shifts.
Not enough to look fearful.
Enough to tell me fear is nearby.
He shakes his head. “Not sure where he’s at. They’re going to extract him, but I don’t know the details.”
“Why?”
“We’re still in danger, Liv.” His arms tighten around me. “I’m doing my best to protect you guys, but until everyone is dealt with, we have to be cautious.”
“Okay,” I say.
I'm not surprised.
The accident was not an accident.
My parents insisted I remembered wrong. They told me the trauma had damaged my memory. They told me I was confused. Maybe I wanted to believe them for a while because if there was no one left to fight for, I didn’t see the point in fighting at all.
“You’ll be safe,” Finnegan says from behind us. “Sorry to interrupt, but I want to assure you our team is trained to ensure your security.”
“Thank you,” I say.
Finnegan tilts his head toward a dark SUV idling near the edge of the tarmac. “You might want to go home. We’re good, but we don’t like sitting ducks.”
“Thank you for bringing her safely,” Creed says.
“It was a pleasure.”
Creed keeps one hand at the small of my back as he walks me to the SUV. His body is angled slightly toward mine, not blocking me exactly, but close enough that anyone watching would understand he is aware of every inch between me and the rest of the world.
He opens the door himself.
I slide in.
He follows, and the door closes with a sealed, expensive sound.
The driver pulls away from the plane.
For a moment, the car is quiet.
Too quiet.
I look out the window as the runway lights slip behind us. Creed sits beside me, close but not touching now, as if the kiss was something we were allowed on the tarmac but the car requires a new permission.
That makes my chest hurt.
So I move first.
I place my hand on his knee.
He looks down at it.
Then at me.
“I’m sorry for disrupting your life,” he says. “He just—”
“They disrupted our lives ten years ago,” I remind him. “This is coming back to you.”
His jaw works once.
“But what about Florence?” he asks. “Was there anyone . . .”
There it is.
The question neither of us wants to ask because the answer can hurt, no matter what it is.
“There was someone I tried to love,” I confessed.
Creed goes still.
I keep my hand on his knee.
“I couldn’t. Because my heart was already occupied by two men I wasn’t supposed to be waiting for.”
Creed looks away, fast.
Not to hide from me. Probably to survive the sentence.
“How about you?” I ask.
He raises his wrist and shows me the tattoo.
The trinity knot catches the low light inside the car.
Then he smiles, but it hurts more than it helps. “My soul was branded by yours and Hal’s so long ago, I didn’t have the will to even try.”
“Creed.”
“I’m not saying that to make you feel guilty.”
“I do feel guilty.”
“I know.” His voice softens. “But I’m not asking you to carry it.”
“I wish—”
“No, Liv.” He turns back to me. “We move forward, okay?”
Foreword.
Such a cruel, simple word.
As if forward doesn't contain ten years of missing rooms.
As if forward doesn't ask me to sit beside the man I loved and lost and love still, while the other man I loved and lost is somewhere I can’t reach yet.
As if forward is not the hardest direction in the world.
I nod anyway. “Okay.”
Creed turns his hand palm up on his knee.
I take it.
The tattoo on his wrist touches mine.
Bella stays quiet.
Tonight feels like a start.
And for now, a start is enough.