Chapter 42
Chapter Forty-Two
Livia
Now . . .
I wake at six on Sunday with my face against Creed’s shoulder and the realization that I haven’t slept beside another person in ten years.
He’s awake.
His hand is on my back, flat, careful, the way you touch something fragile without making it feel fragile.
“How long have you been up?” I ask.
“A while.”
“Watching me?”
“Yes.”
“Creep.”
His mouth curves. “Always.”
We slept in our clothes, on top of the covers, in the room he calls the main bedroom, which has the same expensive emptiness as the rest of the apartment, except for the books on the nightstand.
That was the only part that felt like him.
After the tarmac and the car and the living room that looked like nobody had ever risked being happy in it, I changed into one of his shirts.
It fell to my knees and smelled faintly like laundry soap and Creed.
He kept on a T-shirt and a pair of shorts.
We lay down facing each other like two people with a decade between them and no idea where to put their hands.
Then I told him about Florence.
The institute. The apartment. Moises. Sofia. The tomatoes. The days when Italian felt easier than English because English had too many names in it, I was not allowed to say. I talked until my voice grew rough, and Creed listened the way he always did.
At some point, I fell asleep with his hand on my back.
At some point, I forgot to be afraid.
Now morning sits outside the windows, pale and cold, and I am here.
With him.
Creed says, “The vows.”
I lift my head. “What about them?”
“You meant them.”
“Of course I meant them.”
“Forever.”
I nod. “Forever.”
He breathes out.
It’s the breath of a man who has been holding a question for ten years and just heard the answer without having to ask again.
“Hi, husband,” I say into his shoulder.
His arm tightens around me.
“Hi, wife.” He kisses my nose. “What are we doing today?”
I almost say staying right here until the world forgets where to find us.
Instead, I say the thing that has been waiting under my tongue since the plane.
“I want to see my parents’ house.”
Creed’s hand pauses on my back.
I hear myself, hear how strange it sounds, and scoff before he can ask. “My parents sold my childhood home and moved to some new place I never got to see. I thought . . .”
“Sorry about your parents,” he says.
“You know?”
He nods. “Fitz told me when this whole ‘she’s back, and we need her to get Hal’ thing happened.” His thumb moves once along my spine. “I can’t imagine what it was like, losing both so close together.”
“Mom . . .” I look past him, at the window. “She chose not to get treated.”
Creed exhales quietly. “Maybe it was for the best. Maybe not. My mom had surgeries and treatments that left her weak, and she still died quickly. Too quickly”
I gasp, covering my mouth. “Your mom died?”
His eyes soften.
Right away, grief enters the room and sits with us. Not between us. With us.
“She was extraordinary,” I say, because I met Ana?s a couple of times, and extraordinary is not enough, but it is what my stunned brain gives me.
Ana?s Lafontaine was a meddler with soft eyes and terrifying instincts. She once told me over the phone that when we were ready to let the world know who we were, she would support us. Then added that if, for now, we were “just roommates with complicated grocery needs,” she understood.
Creed nods, then shakes his head. “Last year, we almost lost Dad too. I can’t imagine how it was for you. Losing both and so close.”
“Losing my parents was . . .” I stop and try to find the cleanest truth. “Almost as painful as losing you and Hal.”
His face changes.
Not hurt.
Understanding.
“You never lost us.” He kisses my cheek. “They tried to break us, but we’re still here.”
My eyes burn.
“We’re still here,” I agree.
At nine, we’re in his car, driving north on I-95.
By ten thirty-seven, we arrive at a house much smaller and older than the one where I grew up.
The street is quiet in that Connecticut way that feels curated even when it isn’t.
Bare trees. Wet pavement. Brown leaves collected near the curb.
The house sits back from the road with white siding, dark shutters, and a porch my mother would have hated at first and then decorated within an inch of its life by the second weekend.
Creed parks in the driveway but doesn’t turn off the engine immediately.
He looks at the house.
Then at me.
“No rush.”
“I know.”
I reach for my purse.
The key is in the inner pocket, still on the little ring my father had in his apartment in Florence.
I never thought I would use it.
My fingers close around it, and for a second, my body refuses to move.
“If I fall apart in there—”
“I have you,” he says it simply.
This is Creed, offering the one thing he has always known how to offer.
I nod once, open the door, and step out.
The air is cold enough to make my eyes water, which is convenient because now I can pretend the weather got there first.
Creed comes around the car and waits beside me. He doesn’t take the key. He doesn’t put a hand on my back yet. He only stands close enough that I can lean if I need to and far enough that I still get to walk myself to the door.
The house is closed up.
Nobody has lived here for almost four years.
My mother was diagnosed with stage four cancer.
She refused treatment because the prognosis was nine months either way, and she wanted those nine months not to be spent in hospitals.
She told my father to pack a bag and book two tickets to Florence, because if she had nine months left, she was going to spend them in the city her daughter had chosen.
She got thirteen.
She died in my arms, technically, although she had already gone somewhere I couldn’t follow by the time my arms were around her.
My father stayed in Florence after the funeral because he couldn’t bear to come back to a house where she wasn’t anymore. He came to my place most days. He started learning Italian from a tutor at seventy-six.
He died six months later of what his doctor called a sudden cardiac event and what my therapist called the predictable consequence of grief in a man who had never learned where to put it.
I never planned on coming back to this country.
Or to this house.
The house has been cleaned twice a year by a service my father paid for in advance until the trust runs out or I make other arrangements.
I unlock the door.
The air smells like dust and lemon polish.
It smells like a place kept waiting by people who no longer know how to return.
“We can leave,” Creed says.
I turn around and shake my head. “He said one day that he had to come back to pick up a folder and a letter for me. He claimed he had time…”
My voice trails.
Creed’s eyes stay on mine.
“We always believe we have time,” he says. “But in the end, we don’t choose when it’s over.”
I nod and step inside.
The entry is narrow. There are hooks by the door, empty except for one old umbrella. A console table with a ceramic bowl. No mail. No shoes. No signs of life, which should help.
It doesn’t.
I head toward the bedroom area where there are two rooms. One was my father’s office.
I know it before I open the door.
The room smells faintly of paper.
The desk is neat. Too neat for him, which means someone cleaned around the truth and left the truth exactly where he meant it to be.
On top of the desk sits a brown accordion folder, thick, banded shut with a rubber band that has gone brittle. A sticky note is attached to the front in my father’s handwriting.
Livia. When you are ready. — Dad
I sit down in his chair.
Creed sits on the edge of the desk where he can see my face.
The chair creaks beneath me. It is a small sound. It should not feel like a greeting.
I take the rubber band off.
It crumbles in my fingers.
I open the folder.
The letter is on top.
I read the first paragraph aloud because I don’t trust myself to read it silently.
“Livia. I owe you this letter. An explanation of what happened from the moment of your accident until you decided to start a new life in another country because the accident had taken too much away from you.”
I stop.
The room holds its breath for me.
Creed says, “You want me to keep going?”
I shake my head.
“No. I need to.”
The letter explains that they did the things they did because my life was threatened.
Because I almost died in that accident. Because the Saint Claires had money, reach, people willing to make phone calls from numbers that disappeared.
Because my parents believed the only way to keep me alive was to let me believe I had lost everything else.
They kept documentation.
Just in case anything happened to them.
Or to me.
Their lawyer has copies of everything inside the folder.
I force myself to read the next section.
“Your mother was forty-five when you were born, Livia. We had stopped expecting you. We had stopped praying for you. We had stopped being people who believed prayer worked. And then you arrived, and we didn’t so much love you as build the rest of our lives around the fact of your existence, which is a different thing, and which I don’t think I understood until your mother got the phone call and chose, in under sixty minutes, to trade two strangers’ lives for the chance to keep yours. ”
I lower the letter.
Creed hasn’t moved.
His face is controlled, but his eyes are not.
He says, very quietly, “Liv.”
“They were threatened.”
His jaw hardens. “Why didn’t I think that was happening?”
I frown. “What do you mean?”
“I was threatened,” he says. “They threatened my family too.”
“My mother told me on her deathbed she’d let the wrong fear make the choice.”
“Did she?”
“She did. I thought she meant fear of getting treatment. Fear of maybe lasting longer and suffering more. Fear of leaving Dad.” I look down at the letter. “She didn’t mean that.”
Creed’s hand curls into a fist against his thigh.
I go back to the letter.
“I am a man who spent thirty-six years in insurance underwriting, which is the profession that taught me that paperwork tells you what people want you to believe, and the absence of paperwork tells you what they did. I have spent the last decade collecting absences. The Saint Claires have been very, very careful, and they have not been careful enough.”
I look into the folder.
There are printed emails. Screenshots of texts between Whit Whelan and an assistant whose name appears in three different threads under three different spellings. Bank statements. Receipts. Notes with threats. A log of calls, times, and whatever was said on the other side of the line.
Bribes.
Blackmail.
Threats.
My parents didn't simply choose wrong.
They were cornered—scared.
I go back to the letter.
“Livia. I have built you a case. I have put it in this folder. I am sorry, I was a man who loved you so much I could not bear to risk you. If you can forgive me, do. If you can’t, don’t. Either is yours to choose. The folder is the apology I owed you. Use it with caution.”
The letter blurs.
My breath breaks before the rest of me does.
I press the pages to my chest because I do not know where else to put my hands.
A sound leaves me, small at first, then not small at all.
It comes from a place ten years deep, from the girl who believed she had been abandoned, from the woman who stayed gone because staying gone seemed to be the only thing left she knew how to do.
Creed is on his knees beside the chair.
I don’t know when he moved.
His hand is on my knee.
“Liv.”
“I’m okay.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“I know.”
The tears come harder then.
It’s not pretty.
I cry for my mother trading truth for my life. I cry for my father, collecting absences at a desk in a house I never saw. I cry for Creed. For Halston. For ten years of wrong answers. For all the love that tried to protect me and still left me alone.
Creed doesn’t tell me to stop.
He doesn’t try to make it clean.
He stays on his knees with one hand on my leg and the other wrapped around the edge of the chair, as if the room decides to split open beneath me, he plans to hold the furniture in place by force.
When I can breathe again, he asks, “Do you want to take it with us?”
“All of it.”
“Okay.”
His phone vibrates against his chest.
He looks at the screen.
His face changes.
He answers. “Yeah?”
A pause, then, “Yes, we’ll get in the car with the bodyguards. You’ll drive mine to my place.”
He ends the call.
“What happened?” I ask.
“They want us in the safe house.”
“Hal—”
“Already in motion. He’ll meet us there.”
“Creed—”
“It’s a precaution,” he says.
I look at the folder in my lap.
At my father’s handwriting.
At the evidence he spent years building because he loved me too much and trusted the world too little.
A precaution.
That word has ruined whole lives in this story.
Creed sees my face.
He softens, but he doesn’t lie.
“We’ll be okay,” he says.
I nod, though neither of us believes okay is a place we can reach by saying it.
I put the letter back in the folder.
Then I hold the folder to my chest and stand.
This time, when the house closes behind us, it doesn’t feel empty.
It feels like my father finally handed me a weapon and called it love.