Chapter 30
Q uinn hadn’t known what to expect when Delilah said she needed to talk. But it wasn’t this.
She’d thought maybe he’d done something wrong that he didn’t know about. He’d been a lunkhead guy, offending her in some way he hadn’t realized.
That, he could have dealt with. He could have apologized. He could have learned from his mistakes and moved on.
But this? He couldn’t fix this, and he wasn’t sure it was even right to try. What if he convinced her to keep seeing him and then she lost her children?
He couldn’t let that happen.
And this was one of the reasons he hadn’t wanted to get involved with a single mother in the first place. He hadn’t imagined this exact scenario, but he’d sure as hell imagined one in which her baggage complicated things.
Except, her kids didn’t feel like baggage. They felt like wonderful people Quinn might never have the pleasure of seeing again.
He tried to go back to work on the website for his client, then pushed his keyboard aside.
He couldn’t think.
And, shit, Alex.
A heart attack?
Alex was older than Quinn by about fifteen years—he’d been the result of a teen pregnancy, while Quinn and Jared had come along later, when his parents’ lives were more stable. Still, Alex was young for a heart attack. He smoked, he never exercised, and he ate fatty foods, so Quinn guessed it wasn’t out of the range of the probable.
Still, it came as a shock.
Alex might have died without Quinn ever seeing him again. Was the grudge so important to Alex—and to the rest of his family, for that matter—that he would shut out his brother on his damned death bed?
It wasn’t his death bed, though. Alex had survived.
Which gave Quinn a second chance to work things out with his family, if he wanted to do it.
He just had to decide whether he wanted to do it.
Delilah spent the next couple of days trying to act happy and normal for Gavin and Jesse.
They weren’t fooled, though.
“What’s wrong with your face?” Jesse asked one afternoon.
“My face?” She put a hand to her cheek. “What do you mean?”
"It's all weird and scrunchy," Gavin said.
Was it? Delilah guessed she hadn’t been as good at hiding her emotions as she’d wanted to believe.
“I have allergies.” At least that would explain her red-rimmed eyes. “There’s something in the yard here, I guess.”
Quinn needed to be doing something about his situation. He just didn’t know what.
He couldn’t pressure Delilah, because she was under enough pressure already without him adding to it. And he couldn’t fly to Paris and punch her asshole ex in the face.
That left him at home, puttering around, trying to work but not accomplishing much, and brooding about the fact that he’d been, essentially, dumped.
He hated this. He hated being without Delilah, hated knowing that she was hurting and there was nothing he could do about it. He hated being so ineffectual. And he sure as hell hated the fact that the asshole ex—a guy he’d never met—had this kind of control over his life.
He hated that Alex was so angry with him that he’d face death without ever telling Quinn about it.
Well, at least that was an area where Quinn could take some kind of action.
He sat at his desk, stared at the screen on his laptop without really seeing it, then got up and packed an overnight bag.
He didn’t know if he was going to hug Alex or throw him out a window when he saw him. Given the man’s recent health problems, the hug was probably more advisable.
He guessed they’d just have to see what happened.
Delilah didn’t want to sit around and let her life get smashed to pieces, and she also didn’t want to allow Mitch to be the guy holding the sledgehammer—again.
She needed to know how to react to his threat, and she needed to come up with a plan for her future.
She didn’t know whether she and the boys were going to stay in Cambria, as planned, or return to Connecticut. But she did know one thing: she needed to take legal action now, proactively, instead of reacting later.
Delilah made an appointment for a video conference with her attorney a few days after Mitch’s threat. It was going to cost her three hundred and fifty dollars an hour, but, hell. It was money that used to belong to Mitch, so that seemed appropriate.
Dolly agreed to take the boys during the call, not only because Delilah needed to focus, but also because she didn’t want Jesse and Gavin to hear what she would be saying about their father.
It sucked to be the adult sometimes. It would be so much easier to rage against Mitch in front of any and all who cared to listen. But she had to be better than that. She had to think of her kids’ feelings before her own.
After lunch, Delilah took the boys to Dolly’s and called Miles Lawrence, whom she’d found through her parents.
Delilah wasn’t used to making video calls on her laptop, so it took some fiddling with the program to make the thing work.
Just when she was worried that she might have to scrap the video call and just use the telephone, Miles’s face appeared on the screen.
“There you are! Are you seeing me clearly, Delilah?” he asked.
Miles had come into Delilah’s life after her parents had hired another, less bloodthirsty lawyer to draw up their wills. When Mitch had filed for divorce, they’d referred Delilah to their lawyer, who had sent her to Miles.
At first, she’d thought the older, portly, balding man—who came off as a grandfatherly type—wouldn’t be aggressive enough to represent her against Mitch and his considerable resources. But he’d gotten her a settlement she would have thought impossible and that had allowed her to quit her job and spend two months at Otter Bluff without worrying about her finances.
“I’m here. I can see you,” Delilah told him.
“Wonderful. Now, bring me up to speed on everything that’s happening. Have you spoken to Mitch again since our phone call?”
Delilah and Miles talked about Mitch’s threat, Quinn’s issues with his family, and Mitch’s relationship with his sons, until Miles was completely up to speed.
“It’s true that I haven’t known Quinn very long,” Delilah went on. “But Mitch is making Quinn out to be some horrible influence, and it’s just not true.”
“Okay. This is more common than you might think.” Miles jotted notes onto a yellow legal pad. “People often find it hard when their ex-spouse moves on to someone else.”
“But he moved on to someone else first!”
Miles chuckled, but with no amusement in his voice. “Yes, well. There’s no limit to the contradictions and complexities of the male ego.”
Delilah ignored that bit of wisdom.
“The question is, can he do this? Should I worry?”
Miles steepled his hands on his desk and regarded her over his half-glasses. “It will be an uphill climb for him to win custody in court, but it’s not impossible,” Miles said. “And in matters of custody, I find that you should always, always worry.”
The way they left it, Miles agreed to do some “looking into” Delilah’s case. Since Mitch hadn’t actually filed anything yet, there was no formal work to do. But it paid to be prepared, Miles assured her, so he would do “a little checking”—whatever that amounted to—just in case it came to that.
Delilah felt better having talked to him, even though he hadn’t given her the reassurance she’d hoped for.
It felt better to be doing something, anything.
Now she just had to decide what to do about Quinn. And about her living arrangements.
Quinn’s family lived in Flagstaff, Arizona, where Quinn had first learned to love the outdoors. He’d enjoyed hiking and fishing and camping with his brothers and his stepfather—and his uncle, who’d been an integral part of his family until he’d come out and everyone but Quinn had turned against him.
It was a ten-hour drive, and Quinn opted to do it all in one day. He was driving his van, so he’d be able to stop and take a nap if he got tired.
As it turned out, he didn’t get tired.
He arrived in Flagstaff late, checked in at an RV park where he’d made a reservation, used the shower facilities, and turned in for the night.
He didn’t sleep well, because he wasn’t sure how his family was going to greet him when he saw them.
One thing seemed likely—they weren’t going to throw him a party.
Well, that was fine. He didn’t need one. He just needed to see that Alex was okay, and he needed to say what he had to say.
He could do that whether they wanted him to or not.
Mitch called Jesse and Gavin again the next day. Under normal circumstances, Delilah would have considered that to be a good thing. But in this case, she knew he was just checking up on whether Delilah had broken it off with Quinn.
That was confirmed when Jesse returned Delilah’s phone to her after the call.
“Dad asked if we’ve done any more stuff with Quinn,” he said. “Where is Quinn? We went out on the boat that one day, and then he just went away.”
“He didn’t go anywhere,” Delilah said, though she wasn’t at all sure that was true. “He’s just been busy.”
“But he said he was gonna take us to the zoo. He said he was gonna ask you if it’s okay. And then we didn’t see him again. Did he even ask you?”
“There’s no zoo around here, I don’t think,” she said, avoiding the question.
“Yes there is. There’s a little one someplace nearby, he said, but there’s a better one in Santa Barbara. That’s the one he wanted to go to. The better one. I’ll bet he didn’t even ask.”
“Oh, honey.” Delilah ruffled Jesse’s hair with her hand. “He’s got a lot of work to do. Did you know he has three jobs?”
“He said he was gonna do it, though. He said.”
“Does Quinn still like us?” Gavin asked, his eyes wide.
That, more than anything, was what made Delilah’s heart tear into shreds.
“Of course he does, sweetheart.” She knelt down and pulled Gavin into her arms. He let her hold him, his thumb plugged firmly in his mouth. “Quinn likes you both very much.”
She weighed whether to tell them the truth, then opted to give them part of it—the part that didn’t involve their father.
“I’m going to be honest with you guys.” Delilah was still kneeling, facing both Jesse and Gavin, a hand resting on each child’s arm. “Quinn hasn’t come around lately because of me. Not because of you.”
“Why? What did you do?” Jesse’s look was already accusing, already angry.
“It’s not that I did anything. It’s just … people have differences, Jesse.”
Jesse pulled his arm out of Delilah’s grasp. “You and dad had ‘differences,’ and we don’t see him anymore. And now Quinn. Why do you keep making people leave?”
Before she could answer, he ran away from her and went into his room, slamming the door.