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My eyes slammed shut, and I leaned forward, dropping my head into my hands.
Chapter Three
LIAM
I was out of my seat before I had the coherent thought to move. My hands fisted at my sides, and my blood roared through my veins like a tidal wave. Everything crashed and clanged around in my head—nothing clear enough to process.
It was just . . . loud.
So loud.
No. That was the only thought I could pluck out of the entire mess.
When I was younger, my mum used to let me watchThe Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show. She hated setting me in front of the telly, but sometimes she needed the break. And I always loved the parts where Charlie was at school, his teacher’s voice some distorted, strange sound that didn’t make any sense.
When I speared my hands into my hair and tried to take in a deep breath, tried to make sure I was still breathing at all, the lawyer’s voice likewise pierced the chaos in my head.
I stared at him for a beat and noticed his mouth was very much moving, but I could not understand one fucking word he was saying.
Right. There were other people in the room.
Zoe was in the room.
Amie’s best friend, whom I didn’t actually dislike. I just didn’t know how to fucking talk to her. Every time we were in the same room, she’d look at me with those bright golden-green eyes, and because I’d never seen eyes like that, I always felt the urge to growl at her until she went somewhere else.
Zoe, who at the moment had her head in her hands, her mass of wavy hair falling over the sides of her face so that I couldn’t see those eyes and definitely couldn’t tell one way or the other what she thought of this bleeding idiocy.
Her shoulders trembled slightly, and a cold slice of panic knifed through my ribs at the thought of this making her cry.
“No.”
The word came out in much the same way that I’d pushed out of my chair. Zoe stilled at the sound of my voice. The lawyer stopped his yammering and tilted his head to the side.
He cleared his throat. A delicate little sound. Like he was about to cross a minefield covered with shards of glass and wasn’t sure how to navigate it without losing a fucking limb.
“I know this is a shock,” he said slowly. “We can talk through all of your reservations.”
“Don’t need to.” I set my hands on my hips. “I said no. Don’t want kids. Never have, and Chris fucking knew that.” My voice got louder. The panic churning restlessly under my ribs did too. It felt like a bomb was going to explode through my skin.
Apparently, the news was enough to make Zoe, the sweet friend with the sweet face and the golden eyes, explode too.
“But theychoseyou,” she yelled, turning in her chair.
I wished she hadn’t.
No one could be quite prepared for a look to gut them clean through. But she managed it effectively. She wasn’t any happier about this than I was, but buried in her face, pushing through all the other things she was likely feeling, was the kind of naked grief that was uncomfortable to meet head-on.
Her eyes, as bright and glossy as the surface of that stupid table, shone with it, and despite how much I wanted to, I couldn’t look away.
“They chose you,” she said again, more quietly this time. “Because they thought it was best for Mira to have both of us.”
“I didn’t ask them to.” I kept my voice low. Kept it even and steady.
A fucking miracle, really. And maybe she recognized the dangerous quality of that low, even, and steady tone. But she tilted her chin all the same.
“They didn’t havetimeto ask.”
Fucking. Hell.
