Page 293 of The Lies We Play
“For either one of you, I’d do anything.”
“They might—”
“They will,” she interrupts. “It’ll take time for them to forgive me, if they ever do. But you and Hal matter more than anything. I hate that you’ll be invisible for a while.”
I look down at our joined hands.
The tattoo on my wrist.
The one on hers.
The one on Halston’s.
Three lines. One shape. No beginning without the other two.
“I could quit hockey,” I offer, because if we are making sacrifices, I should too.
Halston shakes his head immediately. “No.”
“Hal—”
“No,” he says again. “We go with the version that passes cleanly through the trustees and lawyers. The version visible from outside is the one that protects all three of us, because the version that protects all three of us is the one Whelan can’t challenge.”
I exhale. “I understand.”
“I know you understand.” Halston’s hand moves from my knee to the side of my neck. “I’m not telling you the part you understand. I’m telling you the part underneath.”
I wait.
He says, “What I have been able to do for you on my own, without lawyers, without anyone helping me, is small. You co-own every account I could change without filing anything. Bank accounts. The retirement account. A life insurance policy I opened after you two moved in with me. Two more I took out the month I came back from telling you about my mother. If something happens to me before this marriage, you two are not protected the way I want you protected. But you are not nothing.”
“What I have not been able to do,” he says, “because I didn't have the authority to do it, is build the rest. The trusts. The structure. The properties. The thing you and Liv should be inside on paper. I could not build it because the assets were not mine to put behind it.”
He pauses.
“After the wedding, they will be mine. After the wedding, I am going to spend whatever it takes, for as long as it takes, to build around you and Liv the structure I have wanted to build for the past three years and could not.”
His thumb moves once at my neck.
“You will both be in it. Equally. No version of it has only one of you in it.”
I want to tell him that we don’t need shit, but I know this is his love language. How they taught him to protect those he loves. “Hal—”
“I am marrying Liv because I love her. We’re signing the fucking paper because we need it. That doesn't prove I love her more than you,” he interrupts me. “I’m not marrying Liv instead of you. I’m not marrying Liv and forgetting you are here. I’m not making you less.”
His hand tightens on my neck.
Liv squeezes my hand.
“I love you,” she says.
Her voice is soft. Small, even.
“You know that, right?” she asks. “I would never choose. I couldn’t. You both own my heart. It’s the three of us, forever.”
“It just feels like I’m going to be left behind,” I confess.
The thing I have been afraid of since I learned how to say ‘I love you’ without controlling the exit.
