Page 104 of The Lies We Play

And now his signature is in front of me, dated yesterday.

Not a photograph. Not an article. Not some sterile proof-of-life released by a family office with a talent for expensive understatement.

His hand touched this page.

Or signed the digital authorization that produced it. Either way, somewhere in New York, Halston Wolfe Saint Claire exists in the same week I do. In the same active tense. Still signing his name. Still participating in whatever machinery has now reached across the ocean and placed itself on my workbench.

My phone rests beside the folder, face down.

His number is saved there, but I bet it’s gone, of course. I'm not stupid. The Saint Claires would have replaced his phone the way they replaced his furniture, his clothes, his wristwatch, his life. I went once back to our apartment, and the keys didn’t work. Not only that, but there was another person living there. It was no longer ours.

But Creed’s number is probably still working.

It has been there for years. I never moved it. Not when I left New York. Not when I changed countries. Not when I changed phones—and numbers. Not when I changed bodies, in the slow incremental way you change bodies after an accident that takes parts of you away and replaces them with something quieter.

Deleting would have been dramatic, and I have a long-standing policy of only being dramatic when it can be mistaken for efficiency. So I moved his name out of favorites. Then out of visible contacts. Then into a single grouping under C, where it sits between Caterina from frames and the customs broker, like a man can be filed alongside a woman who reframes oils and a man who knows the proper paperwork for moving a Madonna across borders.

I could call.

Correction.

I almost called.

Right now, I could pick up the phone and press the old wound until it answered.

The idea is so vivid that my hand moves toward the phone before my pride catches up.

I stop.

“No,” I say aloud.

The portrait says nothing, but I feel judged.

“Don't look at me like that. You lived in the early nineteenth century. You probably fainted when someone showed an ankle.”

I open my phone, and my thumb hovers on his name. Should I call him?

I can almost hear him.

Not the dream voice this morning. Not the rough, impossible, yeah, that woke me with Bella shaking against my stomach. The real one. The one I knew before the accident. Low. Dry. Irritated by feelings unless he was causing them. The voice he used when he stood behind me while Halston read legal clauses and murmured against my shoulder that no man who used the word pursuant deserved love.

If I called, what would I say?

Hello, Creed. Quick question. Did you happen to know our not-dead husband signed an amended access protocol on a Florence restoration file that may or may not be connected to the Saint Claire Foundation, doing something illegal? Also, I dreamed about your voice this morning, and my body has been acting like it received a telegram from hell. Hope hockey is well.

That would not be the worst part.

The worst part would be the question I can't ask. The one that lives behind my teeth like a tenant with a long-expired lease.

Why did you not come? I was supposed to be one of the things you would die for. You said as much. You stood behind me at a courthouse and said ours, and then you didn't come for me, and I have spent ten years building a life that has had to make space for that sentence. I can’t ask you why on a phone call with no preamble. I can't ask you why ever, probably. The answer would either kill me or make me forgive you, and I'm not sure which would be the worst outcome at this point.

I close the contacts app.

Calling Creed with nothing but a signature and ten years of hurt would be emotional arson. Satisfying, probably. Destructive, definitely. I need facts. Dates. Documents. Something more useful than the fact that my heart still reacts to his name like it has been waiting in a locked room with no furniture.

I do the work.

Same as before.