Page 200 of The Lies We Play

I hate that I know the difference and how they complement each other.

I hate it more than my body does too.

Moises sets the bakery bag on the counter. He moves around my kitchen with the ease of a man who knows where everything is, which should comfort me. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it terrifies me how quietly a person can become part of the furniture of your life while another man remains burned into the walls.

He takes a plate from the cupboard.

The blue one.

Because he knows I like it.

He opens the bag, and the scent rises first—warm pastry, butter, sugar, orange zest, custard still rich from the oven. He places a sfoglia on the plate. Golden, fragile at the edges, dusted with powdered sugar that clings to the fluted layers like the pastry has wandered through snow and survived beautifully.

Then he puts the plate in front of the chair he knows I will choose.

He does all of this without speaking.

That is Moises’s gift. He doesn't fill the silence because he is afraid of it. He lets it exist.

I sit.

He pours his own coffee, then takes the chair across from me.

I break off a piece of the sfoglia. The pastry flakes between my fingers. Warm custard slides against crisp layers, soft with vanilla, brightened by candied orange and the faintest hint of lemon. It tastes like something made by a grandmother who has forgiven you in advance.

I close my eyes.

And there it is, waiting.

The truth I have been stepping around for three years.

I tried to love this man.

I tried so hard.

I gave him every part of me I could reach. The version that went to work, paid bills. The one who remembered birthdays and made dinner reservations. Laughed at the correct moments. Kissed him softly. Let him sleep beside me sometimes and told myself that wanting peace was close enough to love.

It wasn’t.

I never gave him the parts Creed and Hal still have.

Those parts never came home with me. They stayed somewhere else, in another country, inside two men who rearranged my idea of love and then left me with a body that remembered them better than my mind wanted to.

Moises has been loving the woman I could afford to be.

He deserves the woman someone else has been keeping in escrow.

I look at him across my kitchen table, and I understand with awful clarity that I am about to take from him the only version of me he has ever known.

I am sorry. I don't say it out loud.

He lifts his coffee.

Looks at me over the rim.

“Livia,” he says, very gently. “Are you okay?”

It is the kindness that almost does me in.