Page 291 of The Lies We Play

Receipts. Affidavits. Timing. Filing. Probate. Public record. Challenge strategy.

The words move around me, clean and intelligent and necessary.

I'm not quiet because I don't understand.

I understand.

I am quiet because, in the last twenty minutes, I have been demoted to an observer in my own life.

Halston turns his body slightly toward me on the stool.

“Yeah?” he asks, as if he knows I have questions.

Yeah.

That is what he gives me.

A single syllable with all that lawyer patience wrapped around it.

I shrug because I don't know how to word any of this without making it about me. And yes, all this fucking shit matters. Lives depend on what Halston does next. Employees. Assets. The foundation. Cornelius’s attempt at one decent final act.

But all at once, I feel outside.

He stares at me, waiting.

Liv is waiting too.

So I say it.

“Where am I in this?”

The apartment goes quiet.

Halston turns fully to face me. He doesn't answer right away.

He moves closer to me, then puts one hand on the marble and one hand on my knee. His palm is cold through my sweats.

He looks at me the way he looks when he is about to say a thing he has prepared in his head for longer than the conversation has been happening.

He is trying to soften the blow.

Of course he is, but I won’t let him.

“You already decided you two are getting married,” I say. “As in no longer a triad. Goodbye to the throuple.”

Liv’s face changes.

Halston’s hand tightens on my knee.

I lift my left wrist and show him the tattoo we got back in December.

“This is forever,” I say. “Unless you need an appointment with the dermatologist to laser it away and do some infinity shit that says just two of us now. No longer three.”

“Creed.”

“No,” I say. “I’m not being dramatic. I just need to know where I’m sitting here. You need me to pack?”

“No,” Liv says, almost offended.