The Forever Girl (Wildstone, #6)(22)



“Yeah?”

“You’ve never been ‘just’ anything in your life.”

She blinked, like she didn’t know what to do with the compliment. Which kind of broke his heart.

“What do you want to do after you graduate?” he asked.

“Run a bar and grill and keep bartending. I like it,” she said. “But I want to be the boss. I think I’ll like that even better.”

He laughed and nodded.

“I got that dream from you, you know,” she said softly. “You always wanted to run your own restaurant so you could feed all your people.”

Funny how their dreams had aligned but not their lives. Heather and Sammie were sitting in the grass. Caitlin was feeding Dillon a bite of her sandwich. Roly and Poly were collapsed in front of their portable water bowl. Roly was asleep. Too tired to stand up, Poly lay there, chin resting on the lip of the water dish, lapping up water. Jace was sitting with them. No one was paying them any attention. “You and Jules doing okay?” he asked.

Maze snorted, then jumped off the swing. “Yeah. We’re fine.” And with that, she headed off to the picnic table, perusing the assortment of desserts Caitlin had brought. Walker followed and grabbed an apple and a wedge of cheese. He began cutting them up.

Diverted from the cookies, Maze paired a piece of apple with a slice of cheese. “I see what you’re doing, you know.” She bit into the snack. Chewed. Swallowed. “Trying to change me. Many have tried. None have succeeded.”

“I wouldn’t change a thing about you.”

She choked on her apple and cheese, and he rubbed her back until she wheezed out an “I’m fine!”

“That too.”

She shook her head and took another bite. He waited her out, knowing that was the only way to get her to talk. Maze didn’t like silence and tended to fill it. And sure enough, she sighed and spoke. “You asked why I lost touch with Caitlin and Heather. I pulled back,” she admitted. “Caitlin thinks she did something wrong, but she didn’t. It was all me. I got locked into a cycle of guilt I couldn’t shake.”

“Maze,” he said, aching for her. The fire that had taken out the Walshes’ house and killed their son had begun in the basement, where the older kids had been working on their plans to sneak out.

Maze had been the ringleader on that particular adventure. Caitlin’s parents had never blamed her for the fire, or for Michael’s death, but she’d blamed herself. When the Walshes could no longer take on foster kids, Maze had felt abandoned. And honestly? Walker 100 percent got that, irrational as it was.

“A few months after Vegas,” Maze said softly, “Caitlin threw herself a birthday party. I didn’t go. I blew her off, no warning.”

“Because of me,” he said quietly, remembering. “Because you didn’t want to see me.”

She lifted a shoulder in a possible admission to that. “I didn’t think about how it would affect her. It was selfish. But then, because I’m me, I made it even worse.”

“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.”

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