Page 195 of The Lies We Play

My mouth opened before my better judgment could sprint across the room and tackle it.

“Why are you doing this?”

A very stupid question, objectively. A woman tells you she has been assigned to make sure of your safety, and you ask why, as though self-preservation is a scheduling inconvenience. As though danger should have the courtesy to submit paperwork and wait for approval.

Eleonora’s expression barely changed.

“As I said, Mr. Lafontaine hired us.”

The words lined themselves up in my head, one after another, and none of them gave me anything solid to hold. Creed hired people to watch me. Creed sent a phone. Creed believed I was in danger.

Creed, who might be back.

Too late . . . maybe.

Still on time to split me open with one ordered sentence passed through another person’s mouth.

Eleonora left the coffee. She left the bag. She closed the door behind her so quietly that the latch made no sound.

I sat at my workbench for a long time without touching either one.

Then, because I am apparently an accomplished professional woman with the emotional fortitude of wet tissue paper, I opened the bag.

Inside was a black phone and a note from Fitzhenry Everhart confirming everything Eleonora had told me. The phone is intended for personal calls only. They swept my apartment earlier, and it will be re-swept as often as needed. His initials at the bottom, neat and cold and official.

I held the phone in one hand and the note in the other.

Then I cried.

Not like a Victorian woman. Nope. I cried in the mortifying, breathless way of a woman who has been functioning on professionalism, caffeine, spite, and the misguided belief that if she can keep making lists, nothing inside her will break. A few seconds. A few minutes. Possibly hours. Time went thin and strange around me.

It felt like being found and abandoned in the same breath.

It felt like Creed reaching for me with one hand while keeping the rest of himself locked away somewhere I had never been invited.

It felt like Halston’s silence. As if the part of me that should have been afraid of how much they both affected me, except fear had become crowded out by longing, anger, and the terrible tenderness of being protected by men who didn't know how to ask to be loved without making it look like war.

I put the note back in the bag.

I put the phone in my nightstand.

Then I spent the night pretending I would not reach for it.

Now morning presses pale and indifferent against the curtains, and I am still staring at the drawer.

The phone waits inside it.

Creed waits somewhere on the other side of that number.

And I hate myself a little for knowing that if it rang, I would answer before the second buzz.

Then I dried my face, put the phone in my bag, finished my afternoon, locked the studio, and rode Bruno home through Florence at six o'clock.

This is a new day. The phone is where I left it.

The light is grey through the curtains. Florence has not committed to the day yet. Bella, beneath my left wrist, is quiet—not the stillness of confirmation, the stillness of having slept, which is its own minor miracle.

I lie on my back and look at the ceiling.