Page 85 of The Lies We Play

Silence.

Then, so quiet I barely catch it: “I need to know if I almost killed her.”

The words go through me clean.

Livia.

“No,” I say, and this time I know it. “You didn’t, Hal.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because you loved her fearlessly. You would never have done anything to hurt her. Not in a thousand lifetimes. Not with a thousand drinks in you that you didn’t actually have.”

A long beat.

“And if I almost killed you?” he asks.

I can't answer.

For a second, I can't speak.

He has been carrying this. Not just, “Did I hurt the woman I’m not allowed to remember?” But “Did I hurt you?” The man on the other end of the phone he was not supposed to find. The man whose name, somehow, was already in his drawer.

“Halston, I wasn’t even in the same vehicle as you,” I managed. “Whatever they told you is a lie. The only thing you have ever done to me is leave for ten years, and you didn’t even do that on purpose.”

Silence.

Then a sound that breaks me—small, shapeless, very far away.

“Okay,” he says.

The line holds that.

So do I.

For a while, there is only breathing. His and mine. Rain and distance and the impossible fact of him alive on the other end, held together by fear and old instinct and whatever part of him remembered me before his mind could catch up.

I don’t know how long we stay like that.

Long enough for my hand to stop hurting around the quarter.

Long enough for me to understand that wanting to see him is less important than making sure he survives long enough to choose it.

Eventually, the breathing changes.

Not sleep.

Decision.

“I have to go,” he says.

“Okay.”

“I don’t know when I can call again.”

“I’ll be here.”

“That sounds impossible.”