Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Creed
Then . . .
Cornelius Saint Claire had been a man who cared about money and the things money could be made to do.
He inherited his father’s holdings in 1967 and tripled them in twelve years.
He bought a building in the Bronx in 1968 that he sold in the eighties for sixty-one times what he paid for it.
He gave to causes the family found politically convenient.
He knew how to turn a signature into leverage, a room into a hierarchy, and charity into a name carved into marble.
That was the man Halston had been raised under.
Then, a year ago, Cornelius started asking different questions.
Not about the family business.
About what Halston was reading.
About his sudden interest in hockey.
About the girl he spent so much time with, the one who was an art major and had opinions about paintings, wine, and the criminal misuse of recessed lighting.
Liv.
We’ve met Cornelius at functions where Liv and I have been guests, though Halston has never introduced us as ‘this is my girlfriend and my boyfriend.’ He introduces carefully.
He places us in language the way he places a glass on a table, with precision and the full awareness of what could break if someone careless reaches for it.
“He’s asked me if I’ve been to the East Sixty-Third townhouse,” Halston says. “The one Constance wanted to sell. Cornelius quietly arranged to retain it in family trust against Bradford’s wishes. It has been empty for six years.”
“Wasn’t it your mother’s?” I ask.
He shrugs.
The shrug is too small for the answer.
“The family absorbed everything she had.”
“Shouldn’t it be yours?”
He snorts. “My grandfather believes in giving. He also believes in taking back.”
“So you’re saying he changed, but he took that back.”
“That was more than ten years ago,” he reminds me. “Now he’s wondering about legacy.”
He says the word like it tastes different than it used to.
“He’s beginning to understand that legacy is not how much money you accumulate,” Halston continues.
“It is not how many buildings you buy or how many trustees sit straighter when you enter the room. The people around him are waiting for him to die so they can take a piece of what he accumulated. Nothing in that says Cornelius Saint Claire was a good man who left something important to the world.”
“So?” I ask because, seriously, that is not Halston’s problem.
It should not have to be.
He has already paid enough for that family’s name. He has paid in childhood, silence, holidays, dinners, boardrooms, and every careful breath he takes before saying what he really thinks.
“So I'm not going to do the public interest fellowship,” he says.
“I'm not going to take the small apartment in Brooklyn. I'm not going to be the man who left the table.”
I still hold his hand. His fingers are cold in mine, even though the apartment is warm.
Outside the windows, rain keeps sliding down the glass in thin, silver lines.
Chelsea glows below us, taxis moving through wet streets, people carrying umbrellas, the city doing what it always does while one man quietly changes the future.
I hold tighter.
Not enough to stop him.
Enough to tell him I am here while he says it.
“While Cornelius lives, I am going to take whatever position he needs me to take,” Halston says.
“I am going to take the seat on the board.
I am going to learn the foundation, the family holdings, the structure of the trusts.
I am going to be inside that family for as long as he needs me, until he finds what his legacy can be.
So when he dies, Constance and everyone else in my family don't tear everything apart.”
His voice doesn't break.
It would be easier if it broke.
A crack would give me somewhere to put my hands. A flinch would let me pull him close. Instead, he says it like a man reading terms he has already accepted and hates.
He looks at me.
“I probably will have to ask you and Liv,” he says, “to marry into that.”
The room changes.
“Because that is what marrying me would mean,” he continues. “They are going to see you. They are going to notice you. Then I am going to have to fight for my grandfather’s legacy, my own legacy, and protect you two from the Saint Claires.”
“Hal—”
“If I don't,” he says, and there is the edge.
Not loud. Worse. “They are going to do to you what they have done to everyone, my family has decided was an obstacle to whatever they wanted. They are going to do it patiently. Over years. With money, lawyers, and small social arrangements that look like favors. They will be polite. They will be generous. They will make you grateful for the knife they carve you with.”
My hand tightens around his.
His gaze drops to our joined hands, then comes back to my face.
“I am going to spend the rest of my life trying to make sure they don't get away with it,” he says.
“I am going to fail sometimes. I need you to know that. I need you to know what you would be marrying. I need you to know I have not asked yet, but I am going to ask, and I am asking you to know what the question really is before I ask it.”
He takes a breath.
It is the first breath that sounds like it costs him.
“I am also,” he says, “asking you to know that I would understand if the day I ask, the answer is no.”
My body goes cold.
Then he keeps going.
“But when you go, you need to take Liv with you.”
There it is.
The worst part.
Halston has built an exit for us inside his own proposal.
He has loved us enough to imagine losing us safely.
I don’t answer right away.
I don’t answer because if I answer too fast, he won’t believe me. Halston, after two and a half hours of telling me the worst things he has ever told anyone, needs the answer to arrive slowly enough that he can trust it.
So I let the silence do its work.
I stay with him inside it.
I keep his hand in mine.
Then I say, “Hal.”
“Yeah.”
“Look at me.”
He looks at me.
His face is composed, but barely. The conference-room man is gone. The lawyer is gone. The boy who watched his mother be taken from a house one rule at a time is sitting beside me, grown now, beautiful and furious and terrified that love is another thing his family can weaponize.
I say, “You think I’d say no?”
He doesn’t answer.
He just looks at me.
So I ask the question that matters more.
“You think Liv would say no?”
His mouth does the thing.
The small movement that means he wants to believe me, but has trained himself not to accept relief too easily.
“No,” he says.
Almost.
“No,” I say. “She wouldn’t. I wouldn’t.”
He looks down at our hands.
“Never,” I say, and the word doesn't come out loud. It comes out certain. “Not because this is easy. Not because we don’t understand what your family can do. Never because you are not something Liv and I survive around. You are someone we survive with.”
“Creed.”
“Listen to me.”
He listens.
I see him decide to.
That choice hurts a little too.
I say, “We’re not marrying the man who walked away. We’re marrying the man you decide to be. If this is important to you, then it’s important to us. We’ll figure it out as we go.”
His face changes.
His mouth opens.
Nothing comes out.
I keep going because if I stop, he might decide my answer was rehearsed, and I will not let him decide that. I will not let him take the truth from me just because he is scared to need it.
“Your mother,” I say, and his hand twitches inside mine. “She raised a boy who, when his grandfather started trying to become a different man at seventy-five years old, recognized the trying and stayed in the room.”
Halston’s eyes go wet.
I keep my voice low.
“That boy. The man that boy became. The man sitting on this couch telling me, on the only night he could tell me, what it costs to be him. That is the man, Liv and I love.”
He breaks.
It is not pretty.
He puts his face in his hands, and his shoulders shake once, and a sound comes out of him that I have never heard before. A sound too old for him. Too young for him. The sound of every door he stood in front of as a child and never opened because no one told him he was allowed to leave.
I take him into my arms.
He comes without a fight.
That is how I know how much it costs.
Halston doesn't fall apart easily. He doesn't give his body to grief unless he knows someone will keep him from being ashamed afterward.
I wrap one arm around his shoulders and the other around the back of his neck, and I hold him the way I have held him after nightmares he pretended were insomnia, after Saint Claire dinners that left him silent, after mornings when Liv kissed his temple before class, and he looked at her like tenderness might ruin him.
He presses his face into my shoulder.
I feel the damp heat of his breath through my shirt.
I hold him tighter.
Not to trap him.
To let him stop holding himself together for one fucking minute.
“It’s okay,” I say, though it isn’t.
Halston says, into my shoulder, “Thank you.”
The words are rough. Barely there.
“No,” I say.
He tries to pull back, but I don’t let him go far. I need him to hear this, where I can see his face.
“No,” I repeat. “Thank you for letting me love you. For letting me hold you and trusting me with this part of yourself.”
His eyes search mine.
He looks like he wants to argue.
He looks like he doesn’t know how.
I kiss his forehead.
Then his mouth.
His hand comes up to my jaw, and the kiss stays soft for exactly one second before it deepens. He tastes like wine and hurt, and the relief he hates needing. I let him take what he needs from it. I give him more.
When he pulls back, his forehead rests against mine.
“Liv is going to be angry she missed this,” he says.
I laugh once.
“Liv is going to say she respected her own boundary and will now require a complete emotional transcript with timestamps.”
His mouth curves.
There he is.
My guy.
“We should call her in the morning,” he says.
“We will.”
“She’ll ask if I cried.”
“She’ll know.”
“She always knows.”
“Yeah,” I say. “She does.”
He closes his eyes.
I keep him close.
The rain keeps moving down the windows. The wine sits open on the table. Somewhere in Paris, Liv is asleep because she asked us to respect that boundary, and somehow respecting it has made this room feel more like ours, not less.
Halston breathes against me.
Slower now.
Then he says, “I don’t want to lose the Brooklyn apartment.”
“You won’t.”
“I just told you I’m not taking it.”
“I heard you.”
His eyes open.
I look at him.
“Brooklyn isn’t a place, Hal,” I say. “It’s the part where we go with you.”
He goes still.
This time, the stillness is not fear.
It is recognition.
I brush my thumb along his jaw.
“You want to sit at the table and fight them? We’ll sit with you.
You want to leave the table later? We’ll leave with you.
You want the townhouse back because it was hers?
We’ll get it back. You want a small apartment, bad water pressure, Liv’s books everywhere, my gear by the door? We can have that too.”
His breath catches.
“Creed.”
“You don’t have to choose between the fight and us.”
His eyes close again, but only for a second.
When he opens them, he looks wrecked.
Loved.
Maybe, finally, believed.
“The Saint Claires will not make this easy,” he says.
“No.”
“They will try to make you regret me.”
“They can try.”
“They will try to make Liv feel small.”
I smile then, not because it is funny.
Because it is Liv.
“Good luck to them.”
That gets a real laugh out of him.
Small.
Broken at the edges.
Mine.
I hold his face between my hands.
“They don’t get to decide what we can survive,” I say.
He looks at me for a long time.
Then he nods once.
A verdict.
A vow without the word.
A beginning of the harder life he thinks he has to warn us away from, and the only life I want if he and Liv are in it.
“Okay,” he says.
I kiss him again.
And this time, when he leans into me, he doesn't apologize for needing somewhere to land.