Owen’s contact at the municipal police is standing fifty feet from the awning of the hotel. And the restaurant. And that back room. He has five of his most trusted officers with him. They’re ready to race in, ready to save them.
Except that he and Nicholas planned for this. Even for this. Nicholas’s words racing to the forefront of his mind.Stay the course.What did they agree to? At the moment you think you can’t, that’s the moment you most need to.
Owen zooms in on Hannah’s face—her beautiful face. She doesn’t look scared, standing there. She looks certain.
And yet it undoes him. Because it all comes down to Hannah, doesn’t it? For Owen, it has come down to Hannah since the moment he met her, since that first moment when she turned toward him. And his whole fucking life began again.
Stay the course.
But which way is the course?
Which way does he move now, if he cannot hear her tell him?
The Waiting Room
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done here?” Quinn says.
We are back on the veranda. I’m standing with Quinn by the outside bar, holding a cold bottle of beer against the side of my face. Holding it against my jaw. My jaw, which is throbbing and angry, the taste of blood still thick and metallic in my mouth.
Quinn stares at me, blank-eyed and completely unsympathetic. I’m not thinking about her though. Not really. I’m thinking about Nicholas.
The bar is as near as we can get to the back room—to whatever is happening in there between Nicholas and Frank. There are no windows looking in on them, no way to see for certain what is going on. The security guards are standing by the door, blocking the only way in. The only way out.
Nicholas is not more than twelve feet away from me—bleeding and injured. It might as well be twelve hundred.
I try to focus on Quinn, on the party happening around us. The party is in full force, like nothing awful is happening.
If anyone even heard the gunshot, you wouldn’t know, not from their actions. No one is picking up their kids and racing out. No one is doing anything but enjoying their wine and laughing. Music playing, appetizers being shared: Wagyu beef, porcini mushrooms, seafood platters.
Teddy is somewhere among them, pretending he didn’t just watchhis father shoot someone. Maybe he’s managed to push it out of his mind—to convince himself that it will be handled, one way or another.
So maybe they heard nothing, at all. Maybe they have no idea something awful is happening. Or maybe that’s what you have to do to survive in this family—to survive existing on the edge of this kind of peril. You don’t see what you’re not supposed to see. You get practiced at looking the other way.
“This was all so fucking unnecessary,” Quinn says.
She shakes her head as the bartender places a shot of bourbon on the bar top in front of her. She downs it, motions for him to give her another.
I think of the utility workers ready to grab us, of everything that has happened since we chose to run.
“I’d argue the unnecessary part was you sending your henchman to my door. To my kid’s apartment,” I say. “But sure…”
“Please,” Quinn says. “Give me a break. Neither of you would have been hurt, just detained.”
“Well, I’m sure that would have been very pleasant,” I say. “Thank you for that clarification.”
“She would have survived it,” she says. “You both would have.”
“Once you got to my husband, you mean?”
“My point is,” she continues, “now this is all something else…”
I feel compelled to argue with her, but I know it won’t do any good. I know that Quinn has no interest in hearing that this has, in fact, beensomething else—for me, for Bailey, for Owen—for quite a long time. She won’t be able to hear me when what she cares about—when all Quinn cares about—is that now it threatens her too.
“Look, Quinn,” I say. “I realize that there is a long history here. And that there is no love lost between you and my husband.”
“You do? You realize that?”
I ignore her tone—her dismissal.
