Chapter 12 #2
I pick it up before I decide not to.
“Yeah?”
Nothing.
Not silence exactly.
Breath.
One slow inhale. Uneven. Held too long before release.
My body goes cold before my mind catches up.
I know that breath.
No.
That’s not possible.
Ten years is a long time. Ten years changes a man. Ten years takes a voice and drags it through grief, money, medicine, family, whatever story people tell about survival when the truth is too ugly to sit with at dinner. Ten years can make memory a liar.
But breath is older than memory.
The person on the other end tries to speak.
Fails.
I don’t move.
Hockey is half waiting. People think it’s speed because that’s what looks good on highlight reels.
But the game is waiting. Reading. Holding.
Knowing the difference between a man who has the puck and a man who is about to have no choice but to give it up.
You wait in the slot. You wait at the blue line.
You wait for the mistake. You wait for the hit you know is coming and decide whether it’s worth the pass.
So, I wait.
The breath comes again.
Closer this time.
Like whoever is holding the phone has pressed it harder against his face because standing upright has become optional.
My fingers tighten around the device and commit before I can be a coward. “Hal?”
The line breaks open.
Not with words.
With the sound of a man losing the room around him.
A chair scraping. A hard inhale. Something solid knocking against wood or glass—a knee, an elbow, a shoulder against a wall on the way down. Then nothing but that breathing again, except worse now. Ruined. Dragged through a place I have lived for ten years and never managed to leave.
My knees almost give.
I put one hand on the counter.
The other one is still curled around the quarter. I can feel the ridges of it pressing into my palm. I don't let go. I have not let go of small hard objects since I was twenty-six years old, and I'm not going to start now.
“Don’t move,” I say. “Don’t hang up.”
My voice sounds calm.
That is the miracle and the crime of it.
Inside, something is tearing through bone.
“Stay on the line, Hal.”
Another breath.
A sound that might be my name if it had survived the distance from his chest to his mouth.
I close my eyes.
Halston Wolfe Saint Claire is calling me.
After all this time.
He’s alive. Though I knew that. Of course, I knew that.
The world said he survived. Articles said he returned to foundation leadership.
Society pages said he attended galas. His family released photographs, carefully curated and infuriatingly sterile.
I saw the man in a suit. I saw the press statements. I saw the perfect resurrection.
But this?
This is not the man in the photographs.
This is Hal.
My Hal.
The man whose silence had grammar. The man who could ask a question with one second of stillness.
The man who used to stand beside Livia with his hand near the small of her back and watch me like he knew exactly how badly I wanted the same touch.
The man who kissed me like he was correcting every law that failed to include us.
My throat closes.
I don't let him hear it.
“Breathe,” I say. “Just breathe, babe.”
A laugh almost comes out of me, vicious and broken.
As if I have any right to tell him that.
For a long time, neither of us speaks.
The line carries the small sounds of whatever room he is in. Rain against glass. City noise far below. A heater clicking. Halston breathing like every inhale has to pass through ten years of locked doors.
I press the phone harder to my ear.
“Are you alone?”
Nothing.
Then, very faintly, “Yes.”
His voice.
I bend forward over the counter.
The apartment tilts, or I do.
I have taken hits that sent my helmet bouncing across the ice. I have played through torn muscle, cracked ribs, teeth knocked loose, blood in my mouth, and pain so bright the world narrowed to skate, puck, bench, breathe.
None of it prepared me for one word from a dead part of my life.
“Yes,” he says again, like he’s testing whether language still works. “I’m . . . alone.”
“Good.” My voice is still calm. I don’t know how. “Are you safe?”
A pause.
Too long.
“I . . . I don’t know,” he says. “Never felt okay—until now.”
The sentence almost finishes me.
Until now.
Then, very quietly, he says, “Until I heard you.”
I have to clear my throat before I can speak again. I do it quietly. He doesn't get to hear me break.
“Tell me where you are, and I’ll get you,” I say.
“No.” A small wet sound. “I think . . . it’s not safe. I’m being watched.”
The old part of me wakes.
Not grief. Not want. Not the stunned animal thing, still trying to understand that Hal’s voice is in my ear.
The other part.
The part that measures exits, names threats, calculates how fast I can get from my apartment to his, who I need to call, whose bones I can break without ending up in a cell before sunrise.
“By who?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Where are you?”
Silence.
“Hal.”
“I don’t know if I can say.”
That answer does more than scare me.
It confirms something I have never been able to prove.
The accident was never just an accident.
I have known it the way the body knows weather before the sky breaks open.
The timing. The statements. The way Livia disappeared behind family money and recovery language.
The way Halston’s family wrapped him in privacy until no one could reach him without a court order or a miracle.
The way I was told, she didn’t want contact, and he couldn’t have visitors, and by the time I found one locked door, three more had appeared behind it.
I knew.
I buried knowing because knowledge without power becomes a disease.
Now Hal is on the phone, afraid to say where he is.
“Okay,” I say. “Then don’t.”
His breath shakes.
“How do I know you?”
The question startles me.
It shouldn’t.
It’s the right question. It’s the only question. He has been awake ten years inside a story written by the people who tried to murder him. What does he have, really, against that story but a stranger on a phone using a name he doesn't remember choosing?
Still.
It guts me.
“You don’t remember me?” I have to ask.
He scoffs. The sound is small and exhausted, almost ashamed of itself.
“I remember the version of myself they told me,” he says.
“I’m a recovering alcoholic. I almost killed a woman one night a long time ago.
I drove drunk, and we crashed and she was—she was hurt very badly, but she lived, and the family paid for everything, and I have been doing the work ever since.
I’m doing the steps. I have been clean for ten years.
I—I am very disciplined about it, Creed, you should know that.
I don’t drink. I don’t take painkillers.
I have rebuilt my life. The family is proud of how far I’ve come. ”
He says the whole thing in one breath, like a recitation. As if he needs me to believe him more than his family. As if he’s praying, but he doesn’t believe in it, but still knows the words to.
I can't speak.
For a second, I can't speak at all.
Because the story he is offering me as evidence that something is wrong.
The way he says the family is proud of how far I’ve come—flat, practiced, the words of a man who has heard his own redemption narrated to him at every dinner table for a decade.
He is performing it for me on a phone. He is showing me the cage he lives in by highlighting the bars.
I stare at the dark window.
Rain moves down the glass.
Somewhere in this city, in a room I can't see, Halston Saint Claire is sitting in the dark holding a phone and reciting his own reform to a man he doesn't remember loving, because reciting is the only language he has left for what was done to him.
I want to put a fist through a wall.
I don't.
I close my eyes.
“Halston,” I say, and my voice is softer than I knew it could still go. “They’re lying to you.”
Nothing.
“You’re nothing like the Saint Claires.”
The silence on the line changes shape.
Not denial.
Not acceptance.
Recognition.
“Then who am I?” he asks.
There it is. The question I can't answer for him in one phone call. The question that is going to take months. Maybe years. Maybe the rest of all our lives, depending on how much of him survived the curating.
I press my thumb to the quarter on the counter.
“I could come to you,” I say.
“They’ll drag me to rehab if they think something is wrong.” His voice has gone tight. “They do it when I’m not performing as they expect.”
“You’re a free man —”
He scoffs. “I’m under the conservatorship of the Saint Claire estate.”
He says it fast. The way you say a thing you’ve been told for so long, you no longer hear how monstrous it sounds.
“Fuck, I knew something had to be wrong,” I say under my breath.
The line goes quiet again.
That silence has a shape I remember.
Halston waiting to see if permission is real.
I sit on the nearest stool because my legs are done pretending. The quarter is still in my hand. I don’t know when I picked it up again. I set it on the counter and press two fingers over it to keep from reaching through a phone like that is a thing a man can do if he wants it badly enough.
Another breath.
“I’ll wait until you tell me I can come,” I say. Because if I have waited ten years, I can wait a lifetime for him—and for her, if I can ever find her.
“You’d wait?”
The question almost takes me out.
Would I wait?
I have done nothing else for ten years.
Not cleanly. Not nobly. Not in a way anyone would call faithful if they could see the inside of it.
I lived. I played. I fucked a few people who meant nothing because meaning was a country I’d been deported from.
I gave interviews. I showed up. I won games.
I let my family think I was emotionally constipated because it was kinder than telling them my whole life had become a room with two missing doors.
Would I wait?
“Yeah,” I say. “I’d wait a lifetime.”