Page 141 of The Lies We Play

“When will Liv get the phone?”

“Soon, if Byron’s contact can move cleanly.”

“And Halston?”

“Sooner, if possible.”

“Tell me when.”

“I will.”

“Tell me before you tell anyone else.”

“Creed,” he says, his voice hardening. “You hired me because I don't let you bully me with grief.”

The call ends five minutes later, after instructions I write in a note app, Fitz tells me to delete, then rewrite by hand on paper I can burn.

I do what he says.

I hate that too.

When the apartment goes quiet again, I open my contacts.

Not to call.

Just to look.

Livia Crane.

There are two entries for her.

The first is the number she had ten years ago. The Manhattan one. The one that went, the second time I tried it, to a recorded voice that was not hers. I have not deleted the entry. I could not bring myself to. Some nights, in the early years, I would stare at it the way you stare at an old photograph of a building that has been demolished. Something used to live there. The map still says so.

The second entry is the one Fitz just sent me. New country code. A number I have never dialed.

A number I'm not allowed to dial tonight. The next line says, “this will be her number when she gets the phone”.

Liv.

I touch the name with my thumb without opening it.

I close the phone.

Then I sit in the too-bright apartment until morning starts turning the windows gray, practicing the only thing I have left to give them tonight.

I don't move.

Tonight, the silence in the room is not one-sided. They are out there. In two cities, on two sides of a wide, quiet existence, I have spent a decade trying to live inside. They are awake. They are not yet safe. They are reachable.

That is more than I had this morning.

It is going to have to be enough until tomorrow.

I don't move.

But I am, finally, waiting for something other than nothing.

Chapter Twenty