Chapter 30 #4
“It’s brutal, Liv. He knows something was taken from him, but he doesn’t know exactly what. You know he gets angry when he’s scared. He gets quiet when he wants to ask for something.”
“Sounds like he’s still there,” I whisper.
“Yeah.” Creed’s mouth twists. “It does.”
“And you?”
He stills.
Of course he does.
I ask about Hal, and Creed answers. I ask about Creed, and he turns into a locked room with marble floors and a concierge.
“Creed.”
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re beautifully dressed and avoiding the question. Those are different things.”
His eyes cut to mine.
There.
The smallest flare of something.
Longing. Amusement. Pain. All of it wearing on his face.
“I’m functioning,” he says.
“That is not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have that won’t make this worse.”
I almost tell him that nothing could make this worse.
Then I remember I have said that before, and life took it as a challenge.
So I stay quiet.
Creed rubs his thumb over the tattoo on his wrist. Once. Twice. A motion so intimate I feel it on my own skin.
“We’ll help him,” he says. “Once he’s back with us, we’ll help him.”
With us.
The words enter the room gently, then detonate anyway.
Not with me.
Not with you.
With us.
The old shape. The impossible shape. The one I have spent years telling myself belonged to a woman who no longer exists.
Except I am here.
Creed is here.
Hal is alive.
And the shape is waiting, wounded and unfinished, asking whether I have the courage to reach for it without knowing if it will cut me open again.
“Tell him I said hello,” I say.
It is not enough.
It is also everything I can manage.
Creed nods. His eyes hold mine. “I will.”
We remain on the call.
I don't know what time it is in New York. I don't know what time it is for me. The morning has gotten away from me. The light through the window has shifted. Florence is loud somewhere outside, scooters and voices and the ordinary clatter of a city with no respect for personal devastation.
Inside my kitchen, on this screen, with this man’s face six hours behind mine and ten years ahead of the last place I left him, the world slows enough that I can hear my own breathing.
I want to ask everything.
Did he love anyone else?
Did he hate me?
Did he dream of me?
Did he touch the tattoo on nights when the investigators found nothing?
Did he tell Hal about me when Hal could not remember?
Did he ever sit beside him and say, There was a woman, and we loved her, and I lost her, and I swear I tried?
Instead, because I am a deeply practical woman and therefore a coward with organizational skills, I say, “I think I have to go.”
Creed nods, but he doesn't move.
“Will I see you soon?” I ask.
The question is small. Ridiculous, considering I have just agreed to fly to New York and petition a court to free the man I married from his family’s control.
Still, it feels like asking whether the sun will rise.
Creed lifts his hand toward the screen.
He almost touches it.
Almost.
His fingers hover there, inches from the camera, and I know exactly what he wants. I know because my own hand twitches on the table. Because I want it too, with an ache so basic it embarrasses me. Touch. Not strategy. Not security. Not lawyers, plans, airstrips, safe houses.
Just his palm against mine.
His thumb at my wrist.
His mouth against the place where ten years of waiting has made me tender and furious.
He doesn't touch the screen.
Of course he doesn't.
Creed Lafontaine has always known how to starve himself in the name of restraint.
The sadness in his eyes undoes me because it is not polished. It is not useful. It doesn't solve anything. It only sits there between us, honest and unbearable, a thing he can't buy, manage, or litigate into obedience.
His hand drops.
“Liv, welcome back.”
The sound my body makes is, again, not a sound.
I close the laptop before I can beg him to say it again.
The screen goes black.
My kitchen returns all at once.
The chair beneath me. The table. The cup with cold coffee. The plate with powdered sugar on its rim. My cardigan slipping from one shoulder. My left wrist is exposed, the knot looking darker than it did an hour ago, as if Creed seeing it has called the ink back to life.
I sit there for a long time.
Florence does what Florence does outside the window. Bella sleeps on my wrist. The cardigan Sofia gave me is around my shoulders. The second sfoglia, somehow, has been eaten. I don't remember eating it, which is rude of me, but emotionally consistent.
I am going to New York.
I have not yet allowed myself to know it.
I know it.
I am going back to the city where I lost them.
I am going back as Halston Saint Claire’s wife.
I am going back to stand in front of a court with a marriage certificate, a tremor, a secure phone, and the deeply inconvenient knowledge that the two men I spent ten years trying to survive are not ghosts.
They are alive.
They might be waiting for me or maybe not. This isn’t the first time I head back to the other side of the Atlantic not knowing what to expect after my absence, but hoping that they’re each in one piece.
Maybe hoping for some love even when I might be too broken and not enough.