Epilogue
Halston
The light in this city does something nobody warned me about.
It comes in low across the rooftops at six in the evening and turns the kitchen the color of a peach left on a windowsill all afternoon. Liv has been telling me about it for four months in a way I understood to be metaphorical, and I’ve only just understood she meant it literally.
Florence is very inconvenient that way.
Beautiful without permission.
The kitchen is small.
Liv’s apartment is small. It’s in a building on a street I still can’t pronounce correctly, three flights up, with shutters that open onto a courtyard and a tiled floor.
The kitchen has a clay pot of basil that Sofia brought up from the garden last week.
Liv has been speaking to it in Italian as if a houseplant deserves full participation in household governance.
Creed is on the floor.
He is on the floor because Creed Lafontaine has spent forty-eight hours inside a thirty-six-hour cold, and he has decided the cool tile of Liv’s kitchen is where a retired hockey player should put himself when his sinuses have unionized against him.
He takes up most of the room.
Naturally.
I am at the small table with a coffee Liv made an hour ago that has gone cold, and a folder of paperwork from a courier who came up three flights this morning and looked at me as if I were wasting his time.
I was, technically, because the paperwork inside the folder is a draft I’m going to redline and send back, and somehow I’m sure he knew that the second he handed it over.
Liv is at the stove making something that smells like garlic, rosemary, and olive oil with a name on the bottle.
Bella is at her wrist.
Bella, who has been at Liv’s wrist for ten years, has been quieter since June.
Not gone.
Quieter.
Liv sees a neurologist two mornings a month and a therapist three afternoons a week. Somewhere between the two of them, Bella has agreed to ask less of Liv’s nervous system. Not nothing. Less.
I watch her wrist while she cooks.
The tremor is there.
The tremor is smaller.
This is how healing announces itself in our house, with a hand that can hold a wooden spoon a little longer than it used to.
Creed says, from the floor, “Dad sent the architectural drawings.”
“For the camp?” Liv asks.
“For the centre.”
I look up from the folder. “Centre.”
Creed sniffs, which sounds tragic and disgusting. “He has stopped calling it a camp.”
“That’s significant,” Liv says.
“He is also using the word ‘campus.’”
“That’s also significant.”
Liv turns from the stove with the wooden spoon in her hand. “Are we letting him use campus?”
“We’re letting him use whatever he wants,” Creed says. “It’s his land. It’s his project. We’re letting him.”
“It’s our project,” I say.
“It’s his project we’re funding,” Creed corrects. “There’s a distinction. I’ve spent a lot of money pretending there isn’t a distinction. My therapist says the distinction matters.”
Liv smiles into the pot.
I do too, though I try not to make a habit of smiling at therapy language. It only encourages everyone.
“How’s the building?” she asks.
“The main building is on schedule,” Creed says. “The new cabins are behind. There’s a permit issue with the third dormitory because Oregon has decided dormitory is a regulated word.”
“Use lodge,” I say.
Creed lifts his phone from his chest, squints at it, then drops it back. “I’ll text him and have him use the lodge instead of cabins.”
Liv turns down the heat.
She comes to the table, but she doesn’t sit across from me. She sits in the chair next to mine, shoulder against shoulder, and her hand finds my thigh under the table with the quiet certainty she has earned back inch by inch.
She says, “By the way, I finally sold the painting.”
I turn my head. “Which one?”
“The Borghese.”
“The one you’ve been arguing with for four months?”
“The one I’ve been arguing with for four months.”
“To whom?”
“A foundation in Madrid.”
“Did they meet your price?”
“They met my price plus a stipulation.”
“Which stipulation?”
“That the painting goes on a five-year loan to the institute first.”
“That is excellent, and you did that without me.”
She lifts her chin, eyes bright with victory and exhaustion. “I told them I wasn’t going to argue about a painting I’d been losing sleep over for four months with a board that hasn’t put a woman on it since 1996, and they agreed to my terms in twelve minutes.”
Creed says, all nasal from the floor, “So what are you fixing? For a non-lawyer who decided to never practice, you fix too many documents.”
I look at the folder.
“I’m filing for recognition of a civil partnership between Creed Lafontaine and the existing marriage between Halston Saint Claire and Olivia Crane Saint Claire, subject to registration and supplemental affidavits in New York.”
Creed says, “Hal.”
“Yes.”
“In English.”
I look at him.
He has put his phone down on his chest. He has taken the washcloth off his forehead and is holding it in his hand as if he’s meeting it for the first time.
I say, “It says they’re going to let me put your name on the paper.”
Creed sits up.
He sits up the way a person does when the body understands before the mind can defend itself.
“They’re going to let you—” He stops, lips pressed together. “Me. You. Liv?”
“Yes.” I close the folder because I can’t keep looking at it and at him at the same time. “All three of us.”
“On a piece of paper?” His voice breaks around paper, and he looks furious at himself for it.
“On a piece of paper,” I say.
“Hal.”
“Creed.”
He puts the washcloth down on the tile.
Then he puts his hand over his face.
He sits that way for a long second, shoulders bent, bare feet flat on the old floor, this beautiful man who spent ten years being made into a witness line and still stayed.
When he takes his hand down, his eyes are wet.
He says, “When?”
“October,” I answer. “Fitz is working on it. We’ll need to be in New York then, and we can finish the office move to Portland in the same trip.”
Creed laughs.
“We’re putting Creed’s name where it belongs,” Liv says.
Creed looks at her.
Then at me.
The courtyard below us is quiet. Somewhere across the rooftops, a church bell rings six times and then a seventh because Florence’s church bells have never agreed on what time it is.
Liv moves to the floor and leans her head against Creed’s shoulder.
Creed’s hand finds her hair.
For a while, we sit inside that sentence.
Where it belongs.
Liv says, “Phil wants us at Juniper Ridge for Thanksgiving.”
Creed sniffles once, then pretends he didn’t. “We’re at Juniper Ridge for Thanksgiving.”
“That sounded final.”
“It was final.”
“I have institute meetings.”
“You have an internet connection.”
“I have a career.”
“You also have a family that misses you.”
Liv closes her eyes.
The fight leaves her face so quickly, I almost reach for her.
“I’m happy,” she says.
Creed’s hand stills in her hair.
Then he says, “I know.”
“I didn’t know if I’d ever get to say it out loud and mean it without waiting for something to punish me.”
Creed swallows.
“Say it again.”
She turns her face into his shoulder.
“I’m happy.”
“Again.”
“I’m happy.”
His eyes lift to mine.
“Hal.”
I know what he’s asking.
I feel the old instinct rise, the one that wants to make the moment neat, private, unprovable. The man I used to be would have arranged his face before answering. The man they made me into would have doubted the sentence before it left him.
The man sitting in Liv’s kitchen knows better now.
“I’m happy,” I say.
Slowly.
Without dressing it up.
Without making it smaller so no one can take it from me.
Liv opens her eyes.
Creed exhales.
I say it again because my therapist says repetition can teach the nervous system what truth feels like when it’s allowed to stay.
“I’m happy.”
Today, I know I am Halston Wolfe Saint Claire.
I am theirs.
I am happy.
We have a home, it’s the three of us. More than one house, but the buildings are just shells.
Juniper Ridge, when Creed needs the center, and the rain, and his father is close enough to argue with.
Florence when Liv needs the institute, old stone under her feet, and sunlight that turns dinner into a painting.
Portland when the offices move, when I build my work around the two people I spent too long trying to find my way back to.
It won’t be simple.
Nothing that mattered to us ever was.
But for once, I don’t need the future to promise me forever.
It is enough that tonight, in a kitchen too small for the life we keep building, the three of us believe it can hold.
Want to read Luther’s book?
NSP
A dead man’s secrets. Two best friends. One love too dangerous to keep hidden.
Title, blurb, cover coming soon. Make sure to subscribe my newsletter to get news about it.
Or preorder here
If you enjoyed The Lies We Play, check out another of my MMF books: LOST IN OVERTIME
Two Rivals. One Woman. No Choosing.
Alberto Wade and Callaway Winthrop were my best friends first—until one night broke us, and the three of us stopped being an us.
Now they’re enemies in the league, an “infamous rivalry” splashed across headlines like it’s just hockey.
It isn’t.
It’s me.
It’s what they’ve always wanted and have never been able to agree on.
It’s the way their hate on the ice has always sounded too much like longing off it.
Now, a shocking trade and an emergency back home drag us back into the same orbit. Older. harder. Still dangerous. Still looking at me like I’m the only thing they’ve ever wanted.
They still want to win.
They still want me.
I still refuse to choose.
But second chances come with scars, secrets, and promises we never got to finish—until a single mistake turns into two pink lines . . .
I’m pregnant—with a baby that isn’t theirs.
The timing is brutal. The fallout is inevitable. And the only way we survive what comes next is if they stop making me choose—stop pretending their rivalry is the only fire between them—and finally admit what’s been burning between all three of us all along.
Because this time . . .
They’re not just fighting for a season.
They’re fighting for us.