Page 62 of Keeping Score

I told myself I wasn’t going to be the one to contact Liam first. I told myself I was going to give him space. I told myself that I would let him come to me in his own time.

But it had been two weeks of silence on his end, and I knew the longer I let him keep his distance, the easier it would be to maintain it.

So, I decided, after the game was over I’d follow Cassie right down to the family lounge where we’d wait for Liam to meet her. He wouldn’t yell at me in front of Lily, even if he wanted to. And he couldn’t kick me out, considering I could be there for Brody just as much as I was there for him.

And I was done with letting him shut me out.

At least Cassie had no such qualms with me.

“Why are you smiling at me like that?” I asked her, suspicious by the freakishly ecstatic way she kept glancing over at me.

Instantly, she reddened.

“I’m not.”

“You’re not?” I scoffed. “Are you telling me that look on your face right now isn’t a smile?”

“I always smile,” she retorted, using her high-pitched lying voice.

“You do always smile,” I agreed, “but you don’t always look like the clown from It when you do.”

She gasped, looking horrified while Lily giggled in the seat beside her.

“You agree with me,” I leaned across Cassie to coo in my niece’s face, “don’t you, Lily?”

Lily covered her mouth, rosy-cheeked and giggling as she looked up at Cassie’s pouting face and then back to me.

“Tell your Auntie that I look perfectly normal,” Cassie urged her, tickling her stomach.

Her little body squirmed under her mother’s fingers as her eruptive laughter filled the air, garnering the attention of other people seated nearby.

“You can’t resort to tickle threats to get the answer you want, Cass,” I sighed dramatically.

“You’re funny, Auntie Maggie,” Lily said, blonde hair matted down by the pink noise-canceling headphones sitting on top of her head. “I was sad ’cause you didn’t come to my house anymore.”

Welp, that was enough to drain the energy out of the entire arena.

It was true—Brody and I would stop over a few times a week to have dinner with them, or hang out or something, but since the fight with Liam, we’d gone from one hundred to nothing overnight.

I didn’t stop to think that Lily might be wondering why.

My heart clenched.

“Aw,” I grabbed her hand across Cassie, giving her hand a squeeze. “I’m sorry I’ve been so busy, Lil. I promise, everything will be back to normal soon. Auntie just had a lot of work to do that was keeping her away.”

“I think Daddy’s sad you’ve been gone, too,” Lily said gravely.

I doubted that. Liam didn’t need me. He’d never needed anyone. And now that he had his family, it would be all too easy to let me fade out of his life. To be one of those siblings you only saw at holidays.

Well, I wasn’t going to make it that easy for him.

He was my brother, goddamn it, and that was a role you couldn’t just walk away from.

Or could he? Would he? Did he want to?

For the first time in my life, I wondered if the damage I’d done had been too great to undo. If Liam and I were at a point that we couldn’t turn back from.

He didn’t need me. I knew that. The problem was, I still needed him.