“Mom.”
I was still trying to understand what I’d heard.
“Mom!”
“Yes, I heard him.”
“Are we going?”
An usher was already walking toward us.
I laughed through my tears.
“Apparently we are.”
Denise stared straight ahead while the people around us applauded Maisie.
Nobody yelled at her or called her names.
They didn’t need to.
She had spent the last several minutes insisting her
son deserved the ball because he was the real football fan, only to have an entire stadium watch him return it to the eight-year-old girl she’d mocked.
For someone who cared so much about who “deserved” attention, becoming the center of it clearly wasn’t as enjoyable as she’d expected.
The usher led us through a hallway beneath the stands.
