Page 203 of The Lies We Play

That is the difference between Hal and us.

He doesn't believe in family as a safe place.

I don’t blame him.

For the little he’s told us, the Saint Claires are shitty people with better tailoring and PR.

So this is a regular Tuesday night. Me at the island, eating leftovers from the food our chef prepared earlier. Yes, we have a chef because I need to eat healthier, and my boyfriend decided that if the league was going to beat the hell out of my body, someone in this apartment should at least feed it correctly.

No. Let’s amend that.

Today isn’t regular.

It’s a shitty Tuesday.

Practice was hard. My hip is unhappy. Liv is in Paris and not answering her phone because it’s three in the morning there, and she has decided, in a recent text, she has decided she is not available for emotional consultation until eight a.m. Paris time.

I love my woman.

I also hate respecting boundaries when the person setting them is asleep in another country, and I would very much like her to wake up and tell me I’m being dramatic—or have video sex.

I am respecting it.

Barely.

Halston puts his briefcase down by the door and his keys in the bowl without looking at it.

That is my first sign.

Halston always looks at things when he sets them down. Not because he is fussy, though he is. Because he was raised around people who notice what can be used against you. He checks placement. Distance. Visibility. Even at home, he registers a room before he gives himself to it.

Tonight, he drops the keys by memory.

Then he takes off his coat and hangs it in the closet.

He stands there for one second too long.

The apartment goes quiet around him. The low hum of the refrigerator. The soft scrape of my fork against the plate. Rain at the windows, thin and cold, making Chelsea look less like a neighborhood and more like a dark pane of glass someone forgot to clean.

“Hal, everything okay, babe?”

He turns.

His face is the one he wears in conference rooms. The one I have seen at three foundation events I was invited to, and one Saint Claire annual dinner I am still recovering from. It’s the face that has won him every argument he has ever had with his grandfather. It’s also the face Liv and I agreed, in a quiet conversation in our bed at two a.m. one night last winter, that we never want to see at home.

He sees me looking at him.

He drops the face.

Underneath it is a man who has spent probably the last four hours pretending not to be furious.

“Board meeting,” he says.

“Bad?”

He nods once. “Bad.”

“Whiskey or wine?”