Page 234 of The Lies We Play

Creed used to love that about me.

Hal used to pretend he didn’t.

I lower my wrist, but my fingers stay over the tattoo. The skin there is warm now. Alive in a way it has not felt in years.

“Do you think he still has it?” I ask.

Creed’s smile fades into something unbearably tender.

“He does,” he says. “He asked about it. Didn’t know what it meant, but had the feeling it was important.”

The room tilts quietly around me.

Hal asked about it.

Some part of him remembered the ink.

Some part of him reached for the mark we chose together.

The three of us.

I press my knuckles to my mouth, but the sound still comes. Smaller this time. More wounded than loud.

For ten years, grief taught me to live with absence as if it were a tenant I could not evict. It sat at my table. Slept beside me. Followed me through museum corridors and grocery stores and quiet mornings when my body woke before my mind and reached for men who weren't there.

Now loss has changed shape.

It has a plan.

A husband with amnesia, and my Creed.

Creed on my screen, watching me fall apart with the agony of a man who wants to catch me and can't.

I want to be angry at him.

I am angry at him.

But beneath the anger is something alive and unbearable. Something that has been breathing in the dark for a decade, waiting for one small, impossible fact to prove it was not foolish for surviving.

“Creed.”

“Yeah?”

“How is he?” My voice trembles. I hate that it does. I keep going anyway because dignity has never rescued anyone from the Saint Claires. “How is he really?”

Creed looks down for a moment.

When he looks back, the polish is still there, but it has cracks in it now. Hairline fractures. A man with too much control trying to speak about someone who makes control useless.

“He is recovering on the wrong clock,” he says. “His mind has been told to forget what mattered to him.”

My fingers curl around my wrist.

“He cried,” Creed adds, and the words hurt him. I can see it. “It’s⁠—”

He stops. Swallows. Looks past the camera as if checking himself before he says too much or not enough.

“It’s brutal, Liv. He knows something was taken from him, but he doesn’t know exactly what. You know he gets angry when he’s scared. He gets quiet when he wants to ask for something.”