Page 109 of The Lies We Play

I don't think the sentence in those words. The sentence arrives in my chest as a kind of weather. A lowering. A shift in pressure.

I am going to bring it down.

For the Halston I loved. For Cornelius. For the version of myself who once stood between two men in a Manhattan courthouse and believed devotion was load-bearing. For the twenty-seven files with my name on them. For my left hand, which is doing the new still thing it does when my body can't afford to react.

For all of it.

But not tonight. Not alone. Not from this studio, with no backup, no plan, and no one in this country who knows what I am sitting on.

I need a lawyer.

Not an Italian lawyer. Not the institute’s lawyer. Not my parents’ lawyer. Someone who knew Cornelius. Someone who has spent the last decade being annoyed about the foundation. Someone who would understand, without my having to explain, why a senior conservator in Florence at three in the morning is suddenly very interested in Article IV, Section 7.

I open a new browser window and search for the law firm named in the charter.

Wakefield, Danforth & Rowe.

Old firm. Old money. Old fonts. The website has been modernized within an inch of its life, but still manages to look like it charges by the heartbeat.

Original counsel listed on the charter: Cornelius Saint Claire, Founder; Nathaniel Rowe, Senior Partner. Beneath, in smaller text: associates of record. Three names. The third one stops me.

Fitzhenry Everhart.

The name catches on to something inside me.

Not because I know him.

Because I have heard the name.

The memory arrives quietly, without the violence of the others. Not a bed. Not a kiss. Not the crash. A desk.

Halston’s desk in the old Chelsea apartment, the one he pretended was temporary and then filled with books, legal pads, and one absurdly beautiful lamp he claimed was practical because he had no emotional vocabulary for liking things. A yellow sticky note sat beside his keyboard for a week.

F. Everhart—call before trustee meeting.

I remember noticing it because the handwriting was Halston’s, and I used to notice everything about his hands. I remember standing behind him with a mug of tea and asking, “Who’s Fitzhenry? Please tell me he’s a Victorian ghost.”

Halston didn't laugh right away.

That was how I learned not every name in his life was safe to tease.

He said, “Cornelius’s lawyer. Or used to be. Young then. Older now.”

“Helpful.”

I didn't ask for more.

Not because I didn't care.

Because I had learned, by then, that Halston opened doors to his family carefully. If I pushed, he shut down. If I waited, he eventually brought me inside and hated himself for needing to.

Creed came in five minutes later with takeout, saw our faces, and said, “Absolutely not. If we’re having rich-people murder talk, I need noodles first.”

I loved them so much in that apartment.

I loved them with the stupid, practical certainty of someone who believed time was difficult but available.

I find Fitzhenry Everhart in a legal directory. He is still practicing. His own firm now—Everhart & Everhart, with a partner whose first name I don't bother to absorb. He is in his late forties. The picture on the firm’s website shows a man in a grey suit who looks like he has never once in his life been surprised, which makes me trust him slightly and resent him completely.