Page 110 of Keeping Score

“Let me see here,” the elderly man said, hand shaking as he held the camera. With a wobbly finger he pressed the button and smiled. “Got it!”

I was sure it was about to be the blurriest fucking photo anyone had ever seen, but I was hoping they wouldn’t take the time to look it over.

“Great, now bring me to my wife,” Liam said, leaving little room for debate.

“And mine,” I said, not bothering to get into the specifics of our current relationship status at the moment.

“Ah, you two like the troublemakers, huh?” the first officer said with a wink. “If it’s those two pretty ladies I saw earlier, then I don’t blame you. Follow me.”

He led us to a back room where a woman sat at a desk in front of a small holding area with ugly gray bars—the kind you saw on sitcoms where the main characters got into some rambunctious debacle and had to spend a night in the cell.

But there was nothing funny about the way Maggie looked laying down on the bench, eyes fixed blankly at the ceiling.

Something had broken her.

Had it been me?

Surely she must know how I felt about her. That the kiss hadn’t been anything on my end at all.

“Liam!” Cassie, who was sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, gasped at the same time Liam’s anguished voice called out, “Cassie!”

“What’s the bail?” I asked, trying to keep my head straight at the sight of Maggie’s look of crumbled dejection.

Her eyes panned to mine, but I couldn’t read them. Or maybe I just didn’t trust myself to anymore, after all the misunderstandings between us lately.

“Who cares? You can take my whole fucking wallet,” Liam interjected, actually dropping it down on the desk. “Just get my wife out of there.”

“Your wife isn’t being held,” the clerk fixed him with a look. “She chose to be in there with the other one.”

Liam’s head snapped toward Cassie and he groaned.

“Why, baby,” he said, eyes closed as he attempted to rub out the crease between his brows. “Why are you trying to kill me?”

The clerk, acutely aware of the dire situation, got to her feet and unlocked the holding cell.

The second the bars slid away, Cassie was out and into Liam’s arms as if they hadn’t seen each other in days.

And I would’ve been judging them if I didn’t take the opportunity to head straight into the cell and crouch in front of Maggie, who for some reason wasn’t jumping at the chance to get the hell out.

“Maggie, babe,” I stared at her painfully expressionless face. “What happened?”

She sat up, flinching away from me when I tried to reach out for her.

Running headfirst into barbed wire would’ve hurt less.

“Yeah, Maggie, what the hell happened?” Liam said, still holding Cassie tucked under his chin.

“It’s complicated,” Cassie squirmed, peering over to Maggie, who sat statue-still on the bench in front of me.

“Margaret here was brought in for charges of assault,” the clerk said.

“What?” Liam and I gasped at the same time.

“Maggie?” I asked, eyes widening as I looked at her, waiting for an explanation.

She didn’t say a single word to defend herself. She was so completely and utterly lifeless, so un-Maggie-like, that I felt fear coiling inside me and didn’t have a single clue how to reach her.

“No!” Cassie said from behind me. “It wasn’t like that! It was just her dad.”