He shifted again.The chair creaked.
“I was twelve,” he said.“Triple-decker house in South Boston, shook when the wind hit it.My little sister Maura was ten, my kid brother Danny was eight.Three of us in one bedroom.Our father?A ghost.If he wasn’t at sea, he was in some port, spending his pay on whiskey and whores.His only contribution to family life was occasionally sending home a crumpled envelope with some cash, just enough to keep us from being evicted.”
His jaw worked, muscles jumping in the stubble.
“My mother Mary,” he said softly, “kept us alive.She cleaned offices at night.Worked the line at a cannery during the day until her hands bled.On Sundays she drew and painted people’s pets for twenty bucks a pop.Little watercolors of pugs and tabbies.Can you imagine?”He gave a short, soft laugh.“She’d stay up ’til two in the morning to get the fur right.”
There was a tug in his voice there, a thread of something like love, like reverence.
“Sounds like a special lady,” Kate said.Careful.Neutral.
“She was.”He looked at her sharply, as if checking for mockery.Finding none, he relaxed a hair.“She took care of her father-in-law too.The old man couldn’t be left alone, not really.He’d get confused, forget where he was, try to go outside without pants.My father’s contribution to that situation was to say, ‘Mary will manage.’So she managed.My mother always managed.”
He inhaled, chest swelling under the too-tight overalls.
“And then,” he said, “the flu came for her.”
Kate could almost see it: a thin woman stilling in the doorway, a cough that wouldn’t go away, the way bones pressed suddenly against skin.
“She got sick fast,” Quinn said.“Fever, chills, lungs filling up.But she kept working.Because if she didn’t, we didn’t eat.One night she came home and collapsed on the kitchen floor.Just… dropped.I called an ambulance.Twelve years old, my brother and sister bawling, granddad keening in the corner like a broken kettle.They took her away.”His fingers tightened minutely, whitening around the gun.“But she walked to the ambulance.She was a proud woman.”
He paused.The TV behind him showed a car chase now, light and movement smearing over his shoulders.Kate kept breathing, slow, steady.Her hands had steadied on the sheet.Listening—really listening—gave her something to anchor to besides fear.
“In the hospital,” Quinn continued, “they said she needed a ventilator.Her lungs were drowning.But the hospital only had one working ventilator that night.The others were broken, on order, or stuck somewhere between here and Canada.One machine.Two women who needed it.My mother, and another.”
He let that sit.
“You can imagine being the doctor in charge,” he said.“Being the one who has to decide.Can’t you?”
“Yes.”Kate met his eyes.“It would have been a terrible position to be in.”
“You’re very diplomatic,” Quinn said.“Terrible.Difficult.Challenging.The kinds of words you people like to use when what you mean is, ‘we played God and killed someone.’”
She didn’t rise to it.“What happened?”she asked instead, though she could guess.
“What happened,” he said, “is that there weren’t enough staff.Flu had knocked half of them out.Roads were iced over, people stuck at home.So guess who was the most senior physician on duty that night?”His gaze sharpened, knife-bright now.“Your father.Second-year resident.Barely out of med school.A kid in a white coat with a God complex waiting to grow.”
Kate’s skin went cold.The room tilted for a second, like she’d stood up too fast, though she hadn’t moved.
“No,” she said, reflexive, automatic.
“Yes,” Quinn snapped.“Yes.Doctor Valentine.Your saintly, martyred father.The hero of a hundred conference presentations.The man the newspapers sobbed over when another man shot him outside a church in Portland, Maine.”
The words slammed into her.She’d read the clippings of course, heard the eulogies.Hearing it poured out in Marsh’s bitter drawl felt like having them fed back through broken glass.
She forced her tone to stay level.“My father did everything he could during that epidemic.I know, because he told me all about that year he spent in Boston.About the winter.The epidemic.All the lost patients.He carried that for the rest of his life.”
“He carried awards,” Quinn said.“He carried funding.He carried the respect of men who never looked my mother in the eye as she cleaned their offices.”His lips peeled back from his teeth.“He also carried the knowledge that one December night in 1983, he decided who got to live and who got to die.”
She shook her head slowly.“He wouldn’t have taken that lightly.”
“Oh, I agree.”Quinn’s voice dropped, almost intimate.“I don’t think he shrugged and saideeny meeny miny moe.I think he weighed up the options like a good scientist.He probably considered age, health, responsibilities.Maybe he thought: this woman is five months pregnant.Two lives.My mother?Only one.”He lifted his shoulders in a parody of a shrug, the gun shifting fractionally with the movement.“Maybe he prayed.Maybe he flipped a coin.Maybe he rolled dice.I’ll never know.I only know that he picked the other woman.”
Kate wanted to argue more.To insist her father would never have tossed a coin over a human life.But in the end, the details didn’t change the outcome Marsh was clinging to like scripture.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.And she was, not in the thin, automatic way she used with victims’ families, but in a deeper, more complicated space where personal and professional blurred.“I’m so sorry your mother died.And I truly believe my father would have agonized over that decision.He wouldn’t, couldn’t, have made it lightly.He certainly wouldn’t have… gambled with it.”
He watched her for a long beat.“You think that makes it better?”
