Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Creed
Then . . .
Halston comes home around ten.
It’s late November, and I know before he gets through the door that it wasn’t a good day.
That is one of the things three years together gives you. Not grand certainty. Not mind-reading. Smaller, more useful knowledge. The sound of a key in a lock. The pause before the door opens. The way a man enters a home when he has spent the day refusing to let anyone see where they hit him.
Yes, after almost three years, the Chelsea place is where we call home.
I still have my apartment uptown because, as Hal says, it’s a good investment. Liv still pretends to live in the apartment her parents got her because she’s still single. She has mentioned Halston to them twice, both times because he drove her to Greenwich during the holidays.
One day, she’ll have to tell them she is otherwise attached to two men who adore her.
That day will not happen until she graduates.
I support her. Whatever she needs. However long she needs. Halston is the only one beginning to dislike that we’re keeping us a secret. He doesn’t push her, but I see what it costs him. He has offered, more than once, to pay for everything if her parents disown her.
That is the difference between Hal and us.
He doesn't believe in family as a safe place.
I don’t blame him.
For the little he’s told us, the Saint Claires are shitty people with better tailoring and PR.
So this is a regular Tuesday night. Me at the island, eating leftovers from the food our chef prepared earlier.
Yes, we have a chef because I need to eat healthier, and my boyfriend decided that if the league was going to beat the hell out of my body, someone in this apartment should at least feed it correctly.
No. Let’s amend that.
Today isn’t regular.
It’s a shitty Tuesday.
Practice was hard. My hip is unhappy. Liv is in Paris and not answering her phone because it’s three in the morning there, and she has decided, in a recent text, she has decided she is not available for emotional consultation until eight a.m. Paris time.
I love my woman.
I also hate respecting boundaries when the person setting them is asleep in another country, and I would very much like her to wake up and tell me I’m being dramatic—or have video sex.
I am respecting it.
Barely.
Halston puts his briefcase down by the door and his keys in the bowl without looking at it.
That is my first sign.
Halston always looks at things when he sets them down. Not because he is fussy, though he is. Because he was raised around people who notice what can be used against you. He checks placement. Distance. Visibility. Even at home, he registers a room before he gives himself to it.
Tonight, he drops the keys by memory.
Then he takes off his coat and hangs it in the closet.
He stands there for one second too long.
The apartment goes quiet around him. The low hum of the refrigerator. The soft scrape of my fork against the plate. Rain at the windows, thin and cold, making Chelsea look less like a neighborhood and more like a dark pane of glass someone forgot to clean.
“Hal, everything okay, babe?”
He turns.
His face is the one he wears in conference rooms. The one I have seen at three foundation events I was invited to, and one Saint Claire annual dinner I am still recovering from.
It’s the face that has won him every argument he has ever had with his grandfather.
It’s also the face Liv and I agreed, in a quiet conversation in our bed at two a.m. one night last winter, that we never want to see at home.
He sees me looking at him.
He drops the face.
Underneath it is a man who has spent probably the last four hours pretending not to be furious.
“Board meeting,” he says.
“Bad?”
He nods once. “Bad.”
“Whiskey or wine?”
“Wine.” He takes a breath through his nose, controlled enough to piss me off on his behalf. “The good one. The one Liv keeps hiding from me.”
“She hides it from you because you don’t appreciate it.”
He scoffs. “I’ll appreciate it tonight.”
I go to the cabinet where Liv hides the bottle she brought back from Burgundy last August. Hides is generous.
She placed it behind the Dutch oven and told both of us, with a very serious face, that if we touched it before a proper occasion, she would know.
Halston said it was not hiding if she announced the location and the threat.
Liv said that was exactly what made it psychological warfare.
I pour him a glass too full for the wine and exactly right for him.
He takes it.
Our fingers brush.
His are cold.
I don't comment on that because if I do, he will make them warmer by force of will and spite.
He sits at the island across from me.
“My stepmother was at the board meeting,” he says.
“Constance is on the board?”
“She has gone to meetings since the year after my mother died.” His mouth turns, but there is no humor in it. “But no, she is not on the board. My grandfather would never allow it.”
I look at him.
He has, in the three years and some weeks we’ve known each other, said the word mother four times.
Four.
I know because each time, the room changed.
He drinks more wine than tasting requires.
“She wanted to know,” he says, “why I am declining the foundation’s vice-chair position.”
“You’re declining the vice-chair position?”
He glares at me because I know he’s planning to live his life and not give two shits about the family.
“I won’t say anything until I’ve graduated and we have a plan,” he states, annoyed, and I know it’s not about me, but he hates the pressure. There’s a plan, I know he has one. Which will actually happen when he passes the bar exam. That’s a January problem, of course.
“They have been waiting for me to accept it for six months. I have been pretending I am too busy with school.”
“You already finished,” I arch an eyebrow.
“They don’t know that,” he snaps, takes a deep breath, and says, “Sorry, I’m not mad at you.”
“So, what did you tell her?”
“I told her I needed more time.”
“And?”
He puts the glass down with care.
Too much care.
“She said, ‘Halston, your grandfather will die soon, and the foundation is going to need leadership it can rely on, and your mother would have wanted you to be the leader.’ In front of at least two trustees who knew my mother personally. She said it with that small, concerned face she has practiced for years.”
“Your grandfather is seventy-five.” I shake my head. “He won’t die any time soon.”
He shrugs because Hal believes that the men in his family don’t live long. His father died seven years ago. His uncle died young too. It’s a thing in the Saint Claire family. Back luck, bad health, bad . . . something.
“The point is that they’re pressuring me.”
I go very still.
Not because I don’t know what to say.
Because I know what I want to say, and it would involve Constance Saint Claire hearing my opinion at a volume the boardroom acoustics were not designed to handle. She’s a cruel woman who gets a kick out of abusing everyone around her, including Hal.
Halston watches my face.
A part of him, even now, is braced to manage my reaction.
That makes me angrier.
“She said ‘your mother,’” he says, disgust riding under each word. “She almost never acknowledges that there was a woman before her who gave birth to me. Today, she said ‘your mother’ twice. She said it like a woman invoking scripture. She said it like she had a fucking right.”
“Hal.”
He looks at me.
The name does something to him. It always does when I say it softly. Not because it fixes anything. It reminds him, I think, that he doesn't have to stand at attention in this apartment.
“Would you like to talk about your mom?” I ask.
He lets out a breath that almost becomes a laugh and fails.
“I haven’t told you about my mother.”
“I know.”
“Liv has asked me twice,” he says. “I have given her the version that is a paragraph long. You have not asked me.”
“I was waiting.”
“For?”
“For you to be ready to tell me.”
He looks at me for a long beat.
This is where Halston usually steps sideways. A joke with a blade in it. A legal distinction. A kiss meant to end the conversation without insulting it. He is very good at escaping with elegance.
Tonight, he doesn't escape.
“I’m ready,” he says.
We move to the couch. I bring the bottle. I bring my own glass of water. I try not to drink during the season.
He sits first.
I sit beside him, close enough that our knees touch.
The fireplace is off tonight, but the city lights make a low glow along the windowpane.
Rain threads down the pane in thin silver lines.
The apartment feels warmer than it did five minutes ago, not because the air has changed, but because Halston has taken off the boardroom face and let the room see what is under it.
He looks at the wine in his glass for a beat.
“Her name was Annaline.”
Halston says it carefully.
Not like a man offering a fact.
Like a man opening a box he has kept shut so long, the hinges may not hold.
Annaline.
The name sits between us.
I have known Halston for three years and some weeks.
I know the sound of his footstep in our hallway.
I know the way his mouth changes when Liv wins an argument, and he is proud of her, but refuses to reward the behavior.
I know how he takes his coffee, how he folds shirts, how he kisses when he has been thinking too much, and how he sleeps better when one of us is touching him.
I have not known his mother’s name.
That hurts in a way I don't show him.
Not because he owed it to me before tonight.
Because he didn’t feel safe enough to give it.
I keep my hand on his knee and say nothing.
Halston looks at the wine in his glass.
“Annaline Wolfe married Bradford Saint Claire at twenty-three,” he says. “She was beautiful. She had a quick mind and a quicker laugh. She had a sense of humor that made people nervous if they were used to being obeyed.”
His mouth almost moves.
Not quite a smile.