Page 202 of The Lies We Play

We dry our hands.

We answer emails.

We pretend the next thing on the calendar is not capable of changing the entire shape of our lives.

When the time comes, I sit at my kitchen table with my laptop open, my regular phone face down beside it, and Creed’s phone in my hand.

The video link is in my email, from Mr. Everhart’s secretary. I click without thinking twice. The waiting room screen appears.

You will be admitted shortly.

My own face sits in the small preview window in the corner. I look at her. She looks tired. She looks ready.

She looks frightened even when she doesn’t want to accept it.

I hate her a little for showing it.

The screen shifts.

Three tiles.

One has a man I neither know nor recognize. One has Mr. Everhart in his office, familiar from pictures on his firm’s website. Hair slightly gray at the temples. He’s handsome and not as old as I had imagined. And a third tile . . . has a background kitchen, dark wood counters. A man with damp hair, a shirt half-tucked, and a mug in his hand.

He has not looked at the screen yet.

He is doing something off-frame—maybe setting his phone down, or moving something out of view. His hands are in motion in a way I remember too well. Elegant, restrained, competent. Then he looks up.

Bella goes still.

It’s Creed.

The way I used to see him during my semester abroad when he couldn’t travel because he had games.

Creed.

My Creed—but I don’t know if he was ever mine.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Creed

Then . . .

Halston comes home around ten.

It’s late November, and I know before he gets through the door that it wasn’t a good day.

That is one of the things three years together gives you. Not grand certainty. Not mind-reading. Smaller, more useful knowledge. The sound of a key in a lock. The pause before the door opens. The way a man enters a home when he has spent the day refusing to let anyone see where they hit him.

Yes, after almost three years, the Chelsea place is where we call home.

I still have my apartment uptown because, as Hal says, it’s a good investment. Liv still pretends to live in the apartment her parents got her because she’s still single. She has mentioned Halston to them twice, both times because he drove her to Greenwich during the holidays.

One day, she’ll have to tell them she is otherwise attached to two men who adore her.

That day will not happen until she graduates.

I support her. Whatever she needs. However long she needs. Halston is the only one beginning to dislike that we’re keeping us a secret. He doesn’t push her, but I see what it costs him. He has offered, more than once, to pay for everything if her parents disown her.