Chapter 26 #3
He pours his own coffee, then takes the chair across from me.
I break off a piece of the sfoglia. The pastry flakes between my fingers. Warm custard slides against crisp layers, soft with vanilla, brightened by candied orange and the faintest hint of lemon. It tastes like something made by a grandmother who has forgiven you in advance.
I close my eyes.
And there it is, waiting.
The truth I have been stepping around for three years.
I tried to love this man.
I tried so hard.
I gave him every part of me I could reach. The version that went to work, paid bills. The one who remembered birthdays and made dinner reservations. Laughed at the correct moments. Kissed him softly. Let him sleep beside me sometimes and told myself that wanting peace was close enough to love.
It wasn’t.
I never gave him the parts Creed and Hal still have.
Those parts never came home with me. They stayed somewhere else, in another country, inside two men who rearranged my idea of love and then left me with a body that remembered them better than my mind wanted to.
Moises has been loving the woman I could afford to be.
He deserves the woman someone else has been keeping in escrow.
I look at him across my kitchen table, and I understand with awful clarity that I am about to take from him the only version of me he has ever known.
I am sorry. I don't say it out loud.
He lifts his coffee.
Looks at me over the rim.
“Livia,” he says, very gently. “Are you okay?”
It is the kindness that almost does me in.
I open my mouth and lie, “Never been better.”
He reaches across the table and puts his hand over mine.
His hand is warm. His thumb moves over my knuckles once, then again, as if he can soothe whatever is happening beneath my skin without asking it to explain itself. He doesn't push. He doesn't crowd. He doesn't make my pain audition for his attention.
After a minute, he lets go.
“Eat the second sfoglia,” he says. “I bought two. They are not for me.”
I blink at him. “Sometimes I think you don’t like sfoglie?”
“I tolerate them.” He presses his lips into a thin line. “I buy them because you like them. After three years, the time has come to admit it.”
A laugh catches in me and almost makes it out.
Almost.
He smiles. That small, wry, private smile that has, for three years, been one of the kindest faces I have ever cared for.
Not loved—cared for.
The distinction is small until it becomes everything.
I have to leave him.
We sit at my kitchen table for another forty-five minutes. He tells me about his current project. He fills the room with his voice, the way a good man offers a buffer between a woman and the thoughts trying to eat her alive.
I care for him for it.
Not in the way that requires me to stay.
In the way that requires me to stop pretending.
At twelve-thirty, he stands.
He kisses my cheek again.
“See you later tonight.”
I repeat, “Tonight.”
He leaves.
The door clicks shut behind him.
For a moment, I stand at the counter with the second sfoglia uneaten on the plate.
Then I cry. I cry with the small dignity of a woman who has built systems for all the things her body insists on doing against her will.
I cry for two minutes.
Maybe more, because apparently, my organizational skills have decided to resign without notice. Also, every tear I refused to shed over the last ten years seems to have formed a committee, elected leadership, and chosen today for its public demonstration.
When I believe I am finished, I wash the plates.
This is what competent women do when their lives begin to fracture.
We rinse sugar from porcelain.
We dry our hands.
We answer emails.
We pretend the next thing on the calendar is not capable of changing the entire shape of our lives.
When the time comes, I sit at my kitchen table with my laptop open, my regular phone face down beside it, and Creed’s phone in my hand.
The video link is in my email, from Mr. Everhart’s secretary. I click without thinking twice. The waiting room screen appears.
You will be admitted shortly.
My own face sits in the small preview window in the corner. I look at her. She looks tired. She looks ready.
She looks frightened even when she doesn’t want to accept it.
I hate her a little for showing it.
The screen shifts.
Three tiles.
One has a man I neither know nor recognize.
One has Mr. Everhart in his office, familiar from pictures on his firm’s website.
Hair slightly gray at the temples. He’s handsome and not as old as I had imagined.
And a third tile . . . has a background kitchen, dark wood counters.
A man with damp hair, a shirt half-tucked, and a mug in his hand.
He has not looked at the screen yet.
He is doing something off-frame—maybe setting his phone down, or moving something out of view. His hands are in motion in a way I remember too well. Elegant, restrained, competent. Then he looks up.
Bella goes still.
It’s Creed.
The way I used to see him during my semester abroad when he couldn’t travel because he had games.
Creed.
My Creed—but I don’t know if he was ever mine.