Page 77 of The Lies We Play

I have taken hits that sent my helmet bouncing across the ice. I have played through torn muscle, cracked ribs, teeth knocked loose, blood in my mouth, and pain so bright the world narrowed to skate, puck, bench, breathe.

None of it prepared me for one word from a dead part of my life.

“Yes,” he says again, like he’s testing whether language still works. “I’m . . . alone.”

“Good.” My voice is still calm. I don’t know how. “Are you safe?”

A pause.

Too long.

“I . . . I don’t know,” he says. “Never felt okay—until now.”

The sentence almost finishes me.

Until now.

Then, very quietly, he says, “Until I heard you.”

I have to clear my throat before I can speak again. I do it quietly. He doesn't get to hear me break.

“Tell me where you are, and I’ll get you,” I say.

“No.” A small wet sound. “I think . . . it’s not safe. I’m being watched.”

The old part of me wakes.

Not grief. Not want. Not the stunned animal thing, still trying to understand that Hal’s voice is in my ear.

The other part.

The part that measures exits, names threats, calculates how fast I can get from my apartment to his, who I need to call, whose bones I can break without ending up in a cell before sunrise.

“By who?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Where are you?”

Silence.

“Hal.”

“I don’t know if I can say.”

That answer does more than scare me.

It confirms something I have never been able to prove.

The accident was never just an accident.

I have known it the way the body knows weather before the sky breaks open. The timing. The statements. The way Livia disappeared behind family money and recovery language. The way Halston’s family wrapped him in privacy until no one could reach him without a court order or a miracle. The way I was told, she didn’t want contact, and he couldn’t have visitors, and by the time I found one locked door, three more had appeared behind it.

I knew.

I buried knowing because knowledge without power becomes a disease.

Now Hal is on the phone, afraid to say where he is.