“Regardless…” I push on. “My understanding is that for you, at least, this wasn’t your original plan…”
“What the hell does that mean?”
I cycle through what I know to be true about her—that Quinn only stepped into a leadership position after her husband was sent away. That Owen, in her mind, is the reason that happened. So, perhaps, it isn’t just the loss of her husband that she blames Owen for. It’s everything else too. It’s everything that her life might have been had she been allowed to sit on the sidelines of this world. Everything that her life might have been if fate hadn’t stepped in to demand something else of her, to demand that she show up—the way she felt she needed to show up—for her family.
“It means that I understand it,” I say. “I understand you not wanting to be involved with your family’s business. You were headed in a different direction, correct? College, law school, an associate position at a prestigious law firm…”
“You think that means you know me? Because you know some biographical details about my past?”
“No. I would never presume that I know you,” I say. “I would just like it if you didn’t assume you know me.”
She narrows her eyes, and I worry that I’ve overstepped. That the opening I thought I’d found was the opposite. But then she starts to speak. For the first time, she starts to speaktome as opposed toatme.
“If what you’re getting at is that plans change, then yes,” she says. “My plans did change after Wesley was sent away. Which left my brother in charge on his own. My brother, who wasn’t equipped to handle the business, on his own…”
“I gathered.”
She offers a small laugh, almost in spite of herself.
“Then what are you asking me, really?” she says. “Why twenty years later I still blame your husband?”
“No. I can wrap my head around that part,” I say. “I assume you blame him because you think he started it.”
She doesn’t argue. She can’t. “Sure…”
“But what I’m saying is that you know, as well as I do, that my husband didn’t start this,” I say. “This started when Kate was killed on the side of the road.”
“That was anaccident,” Quinn says.
But she looks upset when she says it. And I can see what she tries to hide on her face when she does—that maybe it doesn’t matter to her that I believe that. But it still matters to Quinn (more than she would like) that she gets to believe that herself.
It pulls me back to my conversation with Nicholas in the hotel suite last night—to the thing he didn’t want to admit. That moment that Nicholas let me know the organization was behind what happened to Kate on the side of the road.
Quinn is just as uncomfortable as I am to be going back to that moment because she knows that she can’t deny that. It doesn’t matter if she’s managed to convince herself that it was an accident—that Kate’s death wasn’t the intended result that afternoon. It doesn’t even matter if that’s true.
In one way or another, she and her family are the reason Kate died. In one way or another, all our fates were sealed when she did.
“Anyway,” Quinn says. “I don’t know what you think you’re driving toward here. That I should stop holding your husband responsible? That I’m the one who could’ve made a different choice?”
I consider what’s on that tablet, which impacts all of Quinn’s siblings who, either by action or inaction, tried making a differentchoice. It didn’t get any of them far enough away from where they started.
“I was actually going to say the opposite,” I say. “I was going to say that we all have fewer choices than we’d like. And your choice now, mine too, is down to just one. The same choice, really. For both of us.”
“And what’s that?”
“To end this,” I say. “Here.”
She pauses, as if considering that. And I know that, despite her posturing, she hears what I’m saying. She has to hear what I’m saying. There’s a tablet full of reasons why her future depends on her hearing what I’m saying. That this is our last chance to do it—both of us. It’s our last chance to leave the past in the past, once and for all.
We have this in common. It may be the only thing we have in common. We have both spent our lives trying not to be at the mercy of what came before us. Trying, against the odds, to get our families to somewhere better.
“Maybe…” she says. “Maybe, that’s true for me and you. But nothing just ends. Not in this family.”
That stops me. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, there’s always a cost,” she says. “You get that by now, don’t you? When you come for my family, there’s always a cost.”
There’s always a cost.She holds on to the wordcost, like a secret she’s not sure she will let me in on.
