“You shouldn’t be here,” I said.
“Ishouldn’t be here?” He chuckled, pointing toward the McKallister home. “That’s my house. If anyone shouldn’t be here, it’syou whoshouldn’t be here.”
Oh. Yes. Well, that was factually correct. But still, he should’ve just remained tucked away inside his castle. “This is my job, Quinn.”
“Let me see if I have this right,” he said, the look on his face indicating that he was as genuinely amazed by this turn of events as I was. “Your job is stalking my family?”
I paused. How to answer that one? “Um…I stalk other people’s families too.”
“Oh, well, that makes it all better.”
But Quinn wasn’t mad. Far from it. He was loving this, and if I weren’t so blindsided, I probably would be too.
“Is that why you wouldn’t return my texts? I mean, by your reaction it’s obvious I had the right number all along, and you just weren’t returning my calls.”
“No. And then yes.”
“What?”
“No to your first question. My job has nothing to do with why I didn’t text you back. But, yes, to the second question. I was purposely avoiding you.”
He searched my face for an explanation. “Why? I thought we had something.”
This was where I should have stuck the sword in and twisted, vanquishing him from my life forever. It would’ve been so easy. But it also would’ve been a lie. I didn’t want him gone. And he needed to know that.
My shoulders drooped. “We did.”
He exhaled. “So I wasn’t imagining it?”
“No.”
“Then why? I don’t care about any of this,” he said, sweeping his arms to encompass me and my bus full of eyewitnesses.
Yet he said it like he did care. Like maybe it actually could be a reason for my disqualification. “Wait. What do you have against my job?”
“Nothing.”
But he didn’t meet my eye. “Quinn?”
“What?”
“You obviously have a problem.”
“Okay, fine. If I were going to handpick the profession of my one true love, it probably would not be as a tour guide for a ‘map of the stars’ sightseeing excursion, that’s all. Okay?”
“What in the living hell, Quinn? Of all hang-ups in the world, that is a very specific one. I mean some folks have aversions to snakes or germs or people who take more than ten items through the express lane at the grocery store, but you… you draw the line at sightseeing tours?”
Quinn looked like a man caught in crossfire.
I slapped a hand to my hip, strangely pissed at his very elitist phobia.
“Oh, man.” He sighed. “Let’s just say I have an issue with my life being on display for the entertainment of others. And sure, you can say we invited it by courting fame, but in our particular case, we didn’t… I didn’t. Notoriety was thrust on us by a serial killer who picked the wrong victim. You don’t know what it’s been like for me to grow up with a lens always trained on me—with people looking in through these bars and oohing and ahhing as I ran past like I was some zoo animal. Maybe it would have been easier had I not been raised to fear strangers.”
“So, why choose the exact same path for yourself, Quinn? If you think you’re going to escape the lens now, you’re crazy. You’re everywhere, and it’s only going to get worse. You’ll never live a normal life.”
“And that’s my choice. Look, I’m not disputing that most celebrities need this attention to stay relevant. Probably most even crave it. But when I was a kid, I didn’t choose it. Nor did my siblings or my parents. Hell, Jake didn’t either. So, yeah, I have some weird hang-ups about your profession. But I can work through them”—he paused to flash me a killer-watt smile—“for you.”
The idea that I’d played a part in his misery growing up bothered me. The McKallisters really were victims of circumstance.
