Page 132 of The Best Shot

“Mama.”

“So you’re alive,” she said.

“I—”

“You didn’t answer my calls.”

She looked at my friends, who stared back with varying degrees of speculation and caution.

“You can’t pick up your phone, but you’ve got time for a party.”

“How did you even know I was here?”

She didn’t answer that. “Your brother told me what happened.” Her voice went sharp. “I can’t believe you would say those things to him.”

I wasn’t even surprised. “Did he tell you why I said them, or does that part not matter?”

“There is no reason to speak to him that way.”

“He shoved me. I think that’s more than enough reason to say what I did.”

Beside me, Tabby set her glass down hard.

My mother blinked. Only once, but it was enough. Shaun had left that part out.

Of course he had.

“He shoved you?” Her gaze moved over me as though the evidence might still be visible beneath the silver sequins.

“I had a bruise the size of a fist on my back.”

For one brief second, my mother looked shaken. Then she put it away. “Well, I’m sure he didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Would you still be saying that if I’d shoved him?”

“Of course I would. You’re a grown woman, Yasmine. This rivalry between you and your brother is petty and getting old.”

“He put his hands on me.”

“And you always have to make everything bigger than it is,” she snapped. “Say what you want, but Shaun has never asked me to turn against you. You’re the one who keeps trying to make me choose sides.”

She kept talking about sides like I’d drawn the line between us. Like I was the one demanding a choice. But she had been choosing for years.

I just wanted, once, to be worth defending.

I stood slowly. “I’m not asking you to turn against him, Mama. I’m asking you to stand up for me.”

“Yasmine—”

“No,” I snapped. “You came here. You’re going to listen.”

Her mouth closed.

“I have this friend,” I said. “His father has Alzheimer’s. His father doesn’t remember him anymore. Not his name. Not his face. Nothing.”

Nobody at the table moved.

“But he goes to see him every week. They talk. They laugh. He keeps showing up even though I know it breaks his heart that there’s no memory of him left. It’s all been wiped clean. I kept thinking about that. About what it would feel like to sit across from your own parent and wait for some small piece of them to remember you.”