“How?”
“Remember Caitlin’s surprise anniversary party for her parents that same year?”
He nodded.
“I was supposed to get them there. Caitlin asked me, said it was my only job.”
“A pretty big job, seeing as you were estranged from them by that time,” Walker said.
“It’s true that we hadn’t spoken much,” she said. “They’d been busy rebuilding their lives, and me . . . well, I still had some things to work through. But Caitlin wanted me to do it, to make up with them. I agreed, even knowing deep down I’d only make things worse. But I picked them up . . .” She trailed off, eating the last pieces of apple and cheese.
Walker cut up some more, giving her a minute.
“We had a . . . disagreement in the car on the way to the party,” she finally said. “Because that’s what I do, right? Ruin things. Mayhem Maze . . . I wear the nickname well, as we all know.”
He instantly felt sick that he’d ever let that nickname stick to her. “Maze—”
“I was still so angry,” she said, “even though I had no right to be. They asked how I was doing. And I said . . .” She closed her eyes. “I said, ‘My real parents are the only ones allowed to inquire about my life.’ I said they’d given me up just like everyone else, so my life didn’t concern them.” She opened her eyes, and they were filled with regret and pain. “Even though of course I had no idea who my birth dad was and my mom hadn’t bothered with me in years.”
“You were hurting—”
“Right, and we know how much I like to share my pain.” She shook her head. “But they kept it classy. Shelly said she might not be my birth mom, but she’d brought me into her house and thought of me as a daughter. Still did.” Maze paused. “Which of course was one of the sweetest things I’d ever heard.”
“What happened?” he asked quietly.
“I behaved predictably. I said, ‘If you loved me so much, you’d have found a way to keep me.’” She shook her head. “I’ll never forget the look on Shelly’s face. I feel so badly about that and what came next.”
“Which was?”
“When I got out of the car, I saw your truck. Vegas had only been a few months before that. We hadn’t seen each other or talked, and it was like all my mistakes were in one place mocking me. So I compounded my errors and left. And then I guess they went inside, and when everyone yelled ‘Happy anniversary,’ Caitlin’s mom burst into tears. And not the happy ones.”
Walker nodded. Caitlin had been furious with Maze.
He hadn’t been, because unlike Caitlin, who’d looked at this from the other side, he understood how Maze had felt, though as usual, she’d let her emotions get the best of her. Back then, she hadn’t yet learned how to temper herself. But at some point, she’d clearly figured that out. She could now hide herself in plain sight.
“A few years ago, I realized only I held the power to make myself miserable about the past,” she said, “but I also had the power to stop making myself miserable. So I reached out. They responded right away, and I tried to apologize but they wouldn’t let me. They were super kind and happy to hear from me, and I was my usual weird and awkward.”
“Those are two of my favorite things about you.”
She snorted and he smiled.
“What did they say?”
“They wanted to meet.”
“And?”
She closed her eyes. “And . . . I didn’t show.”
“Why?”
“Because I was overwhelmed, afraid, nervous . . . hell, I don’t know, pick one.”
“What were you nervous about?”
She shrugged, but he knew. She’d been nervous that she’d be rejected. She hadn’t been able to trust them when they’d said it was all fine because it hadn’t been fine the last time they’d said that, when they’d had to move into the hotel without the fosters. They’d promised to come back for her, for all three of them, but that hadn’t happened. “I get it, Maze.”
She opened her eyes and looked at him. “You do?”
“Yeah. I do. And I wish you’d stop beating yourself up for things that weren’t just on you.”
She took that in for a beat. “I guess I’ll be seeing them at some point this week,” she said uneasily.
He looked into her eyes, saw the fear. The shame. “But this time you won’t be alone.”
Their gazes held and he did his best to send encouraging vibes, but it wasn’t his strong suit.
“I should’ve found a way to see them before now so it wouldn’t be so uncomfortable. I blame Past Maze. Past Maze is the worst.”
“No, she isn’t, and neither is Present Maze.”
She slid him a look. “Would you still say that if you knew that Present Maze’s plan is to avoid them until the last possible moment, adding stress and anxiety to every day that goes by? I mean, it is how I operate best.”
“Maze. It really will be okay.”
“Easy for you to say. You don’t have to face your past.”
Ha. Little did she know.
Caitlin called them over and tried to get everyone involved in some games. First up was Ultimate Frisbee. She put Maze, Heather, and Walker on one team, and Dillon, herself, and Jace on the other. Then she smiled at Sammie. “Would you like to be on my team?”
Sammie shook her head.
“You know,” Cat said, “one of these days I’m going to win you over. You don’t know this, but when I first met Maze, she tried to resist me too.”
Maze smiled. “True story.”
Walker smiled too. When he’d come into the house all those years ago, Maze had been doing her damnedest to ignore Caitlin. A few weeks later, Caitlin came home from dance camp with a black eye. She’d gotten into a fight with a boy who’d been picking on some girl, and after that Maze decided Caitlin was her person for life.
“I won her over,” Caitlin said to Sammie, skipping the part where she’d had to club some boy in the face to do it. “Just like I’m going to do with you.”
Sammie ran back to Heather.
Caitlin sighed.
The teams went off to separate sides of the beach to strategize, and Heather eyed Maze. “We’re going to play nice.”
Maze studied her fingernails.
“Maze,” Heather said.
“I’m always nice. I’m a peach!”
Walker laughed. Maze was super competitive, always had to win at any cost, and never played nice.
Maze pointed at him to shut it.
Heather looked at Walker. “She’s not going to play nice.”
Walker shook his head. “Nope.”
Maze threw up her hands. “The point of a game is to win. What does that have to do with being nice?”
Heather shook her head. “We should let Caitlin win. She’s so stressed.”
“Letting her win isn’t going to help,” Maze said.
“Then what will?”
Maze scrunched her lips together like she was trying to bite back an answer not suitable for public consumption.
Again, Heather looked at Walker. “I’m counting on you to play fair because I’ve never known you to not be fair.”