Page 225 of The Lies We Play

Even in another life.

Even if the world took our names, our rooms, our plans, our bodies, our history.

I believed it then because love had made me arrogant.

The last time, I stood in Hal’s apartment believing in ordinary things. A game. A night apart. A return. Creed could go play, I could wait, Hal could come home, and the three of us would keep becoming whatever impossible thing we had already become. The air had been warm from the radiator. Someone had left a glass on the coffee table. Hal had laughed at something Creed said, low and tired, and I remember thinking we were going to be okay.

I remember that more clearly than the goodbye.

Maybe because hope embarrasses me now.

Back then, I still trusted the shape of a day. Morning led to afternoon. Afternoon led to night. People left, then came back with cold hands and stories and apologies for being late. I had no reason to believe the universe had been standing there with its hand on the switch.

I was loved by two men who made no sense together and somehow made more sense than anything else in my life.

Creed looks at me now, and ten years stand between us with their hands full.

Not time.

Theft.

There are lines around his eyes I have never seen before. His hair is longer now, loose and uneven around his face, beautiful in a way that looks more like survival than vanity. His expression is still composed in that infuriating Creed Lafontaine way, as if every emotion has been taped up, iced down, and cleared to play before anyone gets to see it.

But his mouth—I internally groan.

His mouth is the same.

The mouth I remember with a devotion that feels almost indecent. The mouth that used to kiss me like hunger and need had finally found language. The mouth that once traveled across my skin and made me feel cherished in a way that terrified me because I had never known what to do with being wanted gently and completely at the same time.

He sees me.

Mr. Everhart says nothing.

The man in the second tile says nothing.

Creed says, very quietly, “Liv, baby.”

I forget how to arrange my face.

Two words should not be allowed to do this much damage. They are casual. Habitual. Almost careless. A man could say them without thinking while reaching over a kitchen counter to take a wineglass out of my hand, or while pulling me back against him on a couch we used to share with Hal. A man who was not legally our husband in the ways the world recognized, but was ours in every way that mattered.

Liv, baby.

It’s a small endearment, with catastrophic effects.

He has used it without preamble, without permission, without earning it.

Except he has earned it.

That is the worst part.

I open my mouth.

“Creed.”

His name comes out wrong. Too short. Too professional. The voice of a woman who has spent a decade saying his name only inside her own head and now discovers her mouth has forgotten how to carry it into the air.

He hears the difference.