Page 42 of The Breaking Point

I sighed, relieved. The last thing I needed was Dad freaking out and going after Brady.

“I got drunk that night I broke up with Will. It was stupid. Brady was nice enough to take me home. That’s it,” I said in a rush.

“You were so drunk that Brady had to carry you inside?”

I blushed. “Um, kind of. I mean, I’d fallen, so Brady was worried about my knee. He was just being chivalrous.”

Mom made a noncommittal noise. “Is there anything going on between you two? Because your dad has been watching Brady, and he seems to pay a lot of attention to you.”

I wanted to melt into the bench. I didn’t even know where to begin. But I also was tired of keeping all these feelings to myself.

“I had a crush on Brady.” I sighed. “No, I still have a crush on him. But that’s it. He’s never been interested in me like that. We’re just friends.”

“It takes a very nice friend to pick you up at a bar and carry you inside your house,” Mom pointed out.

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Just that that doesn’t seem like something a friend would do. At least, not a guy friend. He’s very protective of you.”

“I know. He’s like a brother to me.” Even as I said the words, I winced. The last thing I felt for Brady was something sisterly.

“Well, you’re a smart woman,” said Mom, “and I know you won’t do anything stupid. Although getting drunk alone isn’t very smart. You could’ve been hurt.”

“I know. It won’t happen again. The hangover the next morning was terrible.”

Mom was silent a long moment. “I keep hearing about Brady getting into fights. He doesn’t seem like he’s in a good place right now.”

“I mean, his mom is still drinking,” I said, not wanting to go into too much detail about Brady’s mom. “That’d mess anyone up.”

“Of course. But something changed in the past few years ...” Mom sighed. “Then again, we’ve all changed since Ben died. I know it affected Brady as much as it affected all of us.”

Brady had looked up to Ben. Ben had taught Brady all about hockey, and the two of them had spent a ton of time together at the rink. But when Ben had died, Brady had basically actedlike Ben had never existed. He’d refused to even mention Ben’s name.

I’d never understood it. It’d seemed ... cold. Like Brady hadn’t really cared much about his friend. It was also around that time when Brady had stopped coming by my parents’ place.

“Brady has never talked to me about Ben,” I said.

“Really?”

“You sound surprised.”

Mom frowned. “He was always closed off, but you and he were close. I thought maybe he would’ve talked to you out of all of us.”

“No. At the end of the day, I think Brady has always kept to himself. I think sometimes he acts like he doesn’t need anybody but himself.”

“When we first agreed to foster Brady, I wasn’t really excited about it. He was much older than the other kids we’d taken in. He’d also had some incidents when he’d been aggressive. But your dad was convinced we could make a difference.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“I was also worried about you. You were so young, and we didn’t know what Brady was really like besides what his social worker told us. And sometimes DFS fudges things about kids when they’re more complicated cases.”

“But you changed your mind.”

“More like your dad was going to do what he wanted to do.” Mom smiled wryly. “I told him that if Brady acted up or, worse, was aggressive with you or your brother, he was out of my house. Fortunately, he never gave us any trouble beyond skipping school sometimes and a bad grade here and there.”

I wondered whether Brady had known that Mom was watching him and waiting for a reason to send him away. I hoped not. That would’ve just fueled his belief that nobody had wanted him.

“I was surprised when you two started getting close,” said Mom. “And then it became pretty obvious you had a crush on him.”

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