Chapter 43
Chapter Forty-Three
Halston
Now . . .
When I wake up, Aren tells me they’re moving me.
Just like that, no more explanation, just get ready and grab a few things.
So now I’m in Brooklyn, on a street where the trees have lost half their leaves and the rest are rust-colored, clinging to branches like they haven’t accepted the season yet.
The house is a brownstone with a narrow entry, polished floors, and a kitchen so immaculate it feels staged for people who don’t own coffee mugs.
White cabinets. Black counters. Brass fixtures.
Though there’s nothing that says anyone has ever stood here at two in the morning and eaten cereal over the counter because sleep would not come.
Aren mentioned something about a safe house. Honestly, I didn’t pay attention.
My attention stopped at the mention of Creed and Livia being on their way there.
Livia is coming.
She will be here, breathing the same air as me, and I am afraid I won’t recognize her. Not the way I should.
I know her laugh because that’s all I remember, just like I do her voice.
None of that is enough.
None of it is fair to her.
I pick up a book from the table because my hands need something to do.
A thriller, paperback, spine cracked in three places.
I read the first page four times and learned nothing except that the main character owns a gun, drinks black coffee, and has trust issues, which makes him either a detective or an idiot. Possibly both.
Then the front door of the brownstone opens.
Aren is there before I am, although I didn’t hear him come down the hall.
A woman’s voice in the foyer.
Low.
Quiet.
Familiar in a way that doesn’t belong to my mind.
My body knows before I do.
In no time, I am standing in the kitchen with both hands on the edge of the counter, forearms locked, because my legs have decided to become unreliable without consulting me.
The female voice says, “Where is he?”
Aren says, “Kitchen.”
Another set of footsteps comes up behind her.
Creed.
I know it is Creed before he speaks because my body knows Creed now. My body has known Creed since his thumb pressed the inside of my wrist beside the trinity knot. It knew him in the locker room. It knew him when he kissed me. It knew him before I was ready.
His voice, very low, says, “Go on. He might not recognize you, but he’ll know it’s you.”
There's a pause.
Then she steps into the kitchen.
Livia.
The first thing I understand is that photographs are cruel.
They show a face. They do not prepare you for presence.
She is small, nearly a foot shorter than me, but she takes over the room without raising her voice or moving quickly.
Dark hair falling loose around her face.
Eyes too bright. Mouth trembling with everything she is trying not to spill at my feet.
She wears a coat she has not taken off, as if she came in too fast to remember temperature, and her hand is closed tight around the strap of a bag at her shoulder.
She looks at me.
I look at her.
For a second, the world doesn’t ask anything of us.
Then she says, “Hal.”
My name in her mouth. That’s what undoes me before I fully know her face.
Not the name itself.
The way she gives it back.
The soft breath before the H. The small drop at the end. The ache inside a single syllable. My ear remembers this. My ear has been remembering this for ten years without permission, keeping her voice somewhere my mind could not reach.
She takes one step into the kitchen.
I don’t move.
I can’t move.
I’m standing in the middle of a black-and-white tiled floor, looking at a woman whose name I know because Creed told it to me three weeks ago, and my mouth has not yet been brave enough to say it.
“Livia?”
She presses her lips together and nods.
Her eyes water.
Slowly, she walks toward me until our feet almost touch. Her face tips up. Tiny, Creed called her once, but there is nothing tiny about the force of her standing this close. She feels like a country I was exiled from and forgot how to enter.
Then I remember what I’ve been told for ten years.
What I have been told about myself.
The drinking. The recklessness. The accident. Her blood. Creed’s grief. My name attached to every horrible version of that night.
So I say, “I’m sorry.”
Her face changes.
“For what, Hal?”
“The assholes made him believe he almost killed you,” Creed says from behind her. His voice is a growl now, low and furious. “I told you, you didn’t do shit, Hal.”
Livia nods without taking her eyes off me. “You didn’t do shit. In fact, I believe what you did saved us.”
“Was I drunk that night?”
Creed makes a sound behind her.
“They also made him believe he was an alcoholic,” he says. “A wild party animal who’s been visiting rehab since I was a teenager.”
Livia laughs.
And the room opens.
It is exactly as I remember.
The sound comes through me, and suddenly I can see her at a bar with a book and a drink beside it, wearing a jersey with the number nineteen on the back, looking at me like she has decided I am worth being suspicious of.
The image is gone almost instantly.
But it was there.
I was there.
Livia lifts her hand and touches my jaw.
I turn into her palm before I can stop myself.
Need moves through me so fast it frightens me.
“Hal,” she says softly, “the wildest part about yourself was us.”
“You?” I ask.
Her thumb strokes once along my jaw.
“Creed and I were a luxury you allowed yourself. Your life was boring when we met you.”
“Afterward, it was still boring,” Creed says, “but with good sex.”
Livia rolls her eyes.
I almost laugh.
Almost.
The feeling is unfamiliar enough that it scares me too.
She puts her hand, very slowly, on the center of my chest.
Palm faced down.
Over the place where my heart is beating too fast, and for once it doesn’t feel like anxiety. It feels like my body is trying to answer her.
“Do you remember this?” she asks.
I close my eyes because closing my eyes is the only thing my body has not turned traitor over, and beneath my eyelids, something begins to move.
Quietly.
Carefully.
Her hand has been here before.
Her hand has been here many times before.
In the dark. In the morning. In a kitchen. In the back of a car. On the floor of an apartment. Her hand has been here, and her hand belongs here, and some part of me has been waiting for this pressure to return.
I open my eyes.
I am crying.
I don’t realize it until I see her face blur.
Livia is crying too, and her hand has not moved from my chest.
Behind her, in the doorway, Creed has not moved either.
I look at him over the top of her head.
His face is wet.
I lift my chin.
I do not say anything.
Creed crosses the kitchen in three steps and stops a foot behind Livia. His hand comes over her shoulder and settles on the back of my neck, under my hair, with the exact pressure he used in the locker room when he kissed me like he was trying to return me to myself one breath at a time.
My body remembers that too.
Creed’s hand on my neck.
Livia’s palm on my chest.
Being held this way by both of them in places I can’t name.
We stand like that.
I do not know for how long.
Livia looks up at me, her hand still over my heart. “You’re an amazing man.”
I flinch.
Not because she hurts me.
Because I do not know how to receive that sentence while standing inside the wreckage of what my family made me believe.
She sees it.
Of course, she sees it.
“You are my Hal,” she says, more firmly now. “You might have changed. They might have taken pieces of your memory and taught you to doubt the rest. But I still see you.”
Her voice shakes.
She doesn’t stop.
“I see the man who used to stand in doorways and pretend he wasn’t waiting for us.
I see the man who learned Creed’s schedule better than his own because loving him meant knowing where he was.
I see the man who held my hand when I was terrified and made it feel like I had permission to stay.
I see you, Hal. Not the Saint Claire version.
Not the version they built to survive them. You.”
Creed’s hand tightens once on my neck.
“We’ll get through this,” he says. “We’ll figure out a way.”
“Do you have to go after?” I ask Livia. “Go back to your life?”
The question comes out before pride can stop it.
Creed said we would have to let her go if she had found happiness somewhere else. He said she deserved that. He was right. He is usually right when it costs him.
But she is standing in front of me with her hand on my chest, and I do not know how to let her leave.
I have let Creed go because I know he will come back.
Now even that certainty feels fragile.
Something inside me wants them both close enough to count by touch, as if I could protect them when I do not even know who I was or who I can become.
“We’re not going anywhere,” Livia says into my chest. “You’re our husband.”
I say, “I—”
“You don’t have to remember.”
“Liv.”
She lifts her head.
She is looking at me with the face of a woman who has just been given back a syllable she thought she would never hear again. Her eyes are too bright. Her mouth has gone soft and uncertain and triumphant all at once.
She doesn’t say ‘you said my name.’
She doesn’t have to.
The room has said it for her.
Instead, she says, “Hi, husband.”
I say, “Hi.”
Creed, behind her, makes a sound that is not language.
His forehead comes to rest against the back of Livia’s head.
The three of us are touching. My chest, her hand. Her forehead, my sternum. His forehead, her hair. His hand, my neck. There is no part of any of us that is not connected to at least one of the other two.
I don’t know what to do.
I don’t have to do anything.
Then Liv says, “Hal. Look at me.”
Her voice changes.
Still gentle.
No longer only tender.
I look at her because my body obeys before my mind argues.
“I’m going to tell you one thing,” she says. “This is important.”
I wait.
“I never left you,” she says. “You never left me. They lied to us. We’ve been playing inside their lies and calling it life because they gave us just enough truth to make the cage look reasonable.”
Creed’s jaw flexes behind her.
Livia keeps her eyes on mine.
“We have proof. My father built a case before he died. Fitz has receipts. Call logs. Bank records. Messages. Names.”
“Fitz and his team have enough to help with the investigation,” Creed says.
His voice is lower now, all control and purpose.
“We’re here as a precaution because he found a judge who may issue the restraining order today.
Tomorrow is the first hearing, and if everything goes well, there will be arrest warrants after that. ”
“You have to play on Tuesday,” I remind him.
Creed scoffs. “That’s such a Hal thing to say.”
“He’s still responsible,” Livia says, and there is a smile in her voice through the tears.
“Told you he’s there,” Creed says.
“Your game,” I insist.
“I told you I have time off,” Creed reminds me. “I should be back on the ice by Thursday.”
“You should’ve retired already,” Livia says.
“That’s what everyone keeps saying,” I agree.
Creed looks between us. “Neither one of you has been following me, and now you have opinions?”
Livia fidgets with her lower lip.
I see it immediately.
“What are you hiding?”
She glances at Creed. “I might have searched your stats a time or two.”
“A time or two?”
“Fine. Several times.” She lifts her chin. “I also saw the interview where you said you wouldn’t retire because you didn’t have anywhere to go.”
The room shifts again.
Creed looks away.
I remember that interview. It’s from the day I recognized him. His eyes were so fucking sad then.
“You meant us, didn’t you?” I ask.
Creed’s throat works once.
He nods.
“We’ll figure out our future later,” he says. “For now, let’s focus on Hal.”
“Let’s focus on Hal,” Liv agrees. “Then we can talk about being open, meeting Creed’s family, and maybe figuring out our future.”
“Our future,” I repeat, feeling hope again because maybe I can get myself that.
One of those futures where I can love, be happy, and learn how to become myself—whatever version comes out after this coming downfall.