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Sure enough, tucked against the fridge were two of them. Mira’s name was printed neatly on the spines. Slowly, I let my gaze wander from those fucking books back to the delicate features of Zoe’s face. She was wearing makeup today. Her lashes looked longer and blacker than normal, and my stomach flipped weightlessly at how they deepened the color of her eyes.
Then she arched one of those eyebrows.
It was such a condescending arch too. Something meant to inflame.
That was what Zoe didn’t understand about herself. What she’d never understood about how she dealt with me.
All she had to do—all she’d ever had to do—was simply be there.
Stand there.
Look at me.
Breathe.
That’s all it took, and I was desperately, impossibly inflamed.
Nowhere to put the energy and nothing I could say to make her hate me less after a decade of contention between us.
I answered her slowly. “I’d rather pluck my eyeballs out than open those.”
Contention was better than possibility, though, because the last thing I needed in my life—especially now—was for her to realize her absolute, impossible power over me, the kind she held tight in her fist and didn’t even know about.
Zoe rolled her eyes and walked into the family room, where she whispered something to Mira.
The movie was put on pause, and Mira hopped up off the floor and pranced into the kitchen. She stopped when she saw me, and I tried my best to soften my face. I didn’t crouch down, because I always hated it when adults made little kids hug them or high-five them or do stupid shit when they might be uncomfortable.
“Hey, Mira,” I said. “You remember me?”
Carefully, she nodded. Then she took a few steps out from behind Zoe.
“You remember my name?”
Mira’s hair was messy and wild, and she was still wearing cotton pajamas printed with little ducks in rain boots. She took another step and motioned me closer with her hand.
Zoe started chewing on her thumbnail, her nerves clear, as I bent my knees and put my hands on the tops of my thighs to lean closer.
Mira reached her hand up and pinched my nose. Hard.
I made a growling sound, deep in my chest, and she giggled.
“Uncle Liam,” she said, then honked my nose again.
I tweaked one of her curls. “That’s right.”
From the moment Mira was born, Chris had insisted on the unofficial family moniker. No matter how much I’d argued it, she’d called me Uncle Liam since she was able to form the words. And of course Chris and Amie had popped out a precocious little shit of a child, so she’d been doing it for at least a year.
As I straightened back to my full height and Zoe let out a quiet sigh of relief, Mira stepped forward again and wrapped her arms around my leg.
It was like someone had punched a ragged hole right through my chest. All the skin and bone and muscles—designed to protect everything inside—they folded like wet paper. That’s how it felt when those skinny little arms were wrapped around my leg.
Maybe a better man would’ve leaned down to pick her up.
Maybe a softer man who understood how all this worked.
But with Zoe’s watchful golden eyes aimed straight at me, all I could manage was a soft pat on the top of Mira’s head.
I had the creeping sensation that if I picked her up, if I gave her a proper hug, I’d fucking cry or something, and there was no way I was letting Miss Valentine get the satisfaction of seeing it.
