Page 231 of The Lies We Play

Instead, it comes out like the ten-years-old wound it is.

Creed lets out a humorless laugh. Not amusement. Something closer to a man discovering the floor beneath him was never there.

“Baby, I tried for years. Your parents had me on a goose chase since⁠—”

“My parents?”

His face stills.

“Yeah. I talked to your mother several times.”

“No.” I shake my head. “She said nobody had reached out to me.”

His laugh this time is worse. Short. Almost broken. As if one of the last supports inside him has snapped clean through.

“For an entire year, she sent me to different hospitals. Said you couldn’t wake up. Said visitors weren’t allowed. Only family.” His mouth presses into a line. “That one hurt so fucking much.”

My fingers curl around the edge of the table.

“When I asked if you had called . . .” My voice fails. I hate that it fails. I hate that I sound small. “She swore no one had looked for me, tried to convince me that I had never met you—or that Hal and I weren’t married.”

Creed looks directly into the camera.

“I’m sorry, baby, but she lied to you.”

He says it calmly.

Too calmly.

I can see the effort in his face. The way he is holding himself together because if he stops, something violent and grieving might come out.

“The first month, your mother told me you were in upstate New York and not taking visitors. I went there. I stood outside the clinic.” He sighs. “Someone finally took pity on me and told me you weren’t a patient there. It happened several times. At some point, she changed her number. Your parents moved from your old house. I hired private investigators. One of them found a clinic in Switzerland with your name on a transfer ledger. You had been a patient for a couple of years before we could reach you.”

My pulse bangs so hard I feel it in my teeth.

“I went to Zurich,” he says. “I stood outside that building. They wouldn’t disclose shit, but Fitz was able to figure out that you had been there for four months. After that, there was no trace of you. It was like you disappeared.”

I shake my head, but it feels detached from the rest of me.

“I wasn’t hiding.”

“I know.” His voice cracks on those two words, almost too quietly to catch. “At some point, I believed you were dead, Liv. That the Saint Claire’s had killed you because I didn’t stop looking—even after all the threats.”

The room blurs.

Not entirely. Just at the edges, like my body is trying to protect me and doing a very poor job because it has always been overcommitted and underqualified.

Creed looks at me as if he can't believe I am here.

As if luck has walked into his life with my face, and he doesn't trust it not to leave again.

“Someone was trying to make sure I wouldn’t find you,” he says.

He stops.

“Creed.”

“I never stopped looking.” The words come fast now, almost pleading. “I looked, and I tried to live while I searched and hoped and⁠—”