Chapter 30
Harlan
I t’s raining and dark when I show up at Quinn’s house. Lights are on inside, and Christmas lights twinkle around the windows.
As I approach the screen door, I can see Quinn in the kitchen, decorating a round cake. She’s spinning it on a turntable, scraping the pink icing on the sides to make it perfectly smooth.
I knock lightly on the old door frame, rattling the screen.
When she looks up, a lock of chocolate-brown hair falls over her face. I never would’ve thought she could get any prettier than she already was with that crazy turquoise hair, but I’m looking at her right now, and she’s fucking beautiful. I don’t know if it’s the pregnancy or the fact that she’s just meant to be a brunette, but she’s glowing.
She looks surprised to see me, standing out here in the rain. “Harlan.” She walks over to the screen door. “What are you doing here?”
“Well, sitting at home on a rainy night watching a cat heal is fairly boring.”
“If you’re trying to be adorably pathetic, it’s totally working.” She opens the door and tugs me in out of the rain.
The next thing I know she’s ladling apple cider from a pot on the stove into a mug for me and dusting it with cinnamon. The whole place smells like apples and cinnamon, Christmas decorations have been hung everywhere, and music is playing softly somewhere down the hall to the bedrooms. Not Christmas music. The eighties stuff Quinn and her mom love.
We take our mugs into the living room, where there’s a small Christmas tree twinkling, and boxes and piles of… stuff. Literally everywhere. I watch in awe as Quinn manages to clear a few piles from the sofa to balance precariously on other piles, so that we can sit down.
The mess doesn’t even stress me out as much as I’d think it would, I’m just so glad to be with her.
“We’ve been clearing out Mom’s everything room to make room for the baby,” she explains. “It’s been a process, as you can see.”
“Everything room?”
“Yeah.” Quinn blows on her hot cider. “That’s what we call it. It’s the room where Mom puts everything she can’t bear to part with. And believe me, there’s a lot of it. There isn’t a hobby that woman hasn’t tried over the last six years.”
Six years. I wonder if that’s how long Lorraine’s been living with cancer, and unable to work as much.
I’m trying to get a look at the photos in a photo album that lies open on the coffee table, without being obvious about it. “I’m seeing knitting, jigsaw puzzles, what appears to be decades worth of birthday cards… and what looks like a mild pottery obsession? And I don’t even know what else.”
“No one but Lorraine really does,” Quinn teases as her mom comes in, wearing a South Park T-shirt and pajama pants, and carrying a fluffy pink blanket.
“Harlan,” Lorraine says happily, “I thought I heard your voice! It’s quite sexy, you know.”
I think Quinn almost chokes on her cider. “Mom. Take it easy.”
“We’re having a little trouble with the old heater in here,” Lorraine says to me, as she wraps me in the blanket, tucking me in like I’m her child. “Sorry for the chaos. It’s all for the greater good, and a home for that baby.”
“No apology needed,” I tell her. “This is what a home feels like.”
Lorraine smiles, delighted, and wraps Quinn in another blanket she pulls off the back of the sofa. Quinn looks mildly put out as her mom fusses over her, but doesn’t complain. Cozy isn’t even a strong enough word for this feeling. It’s cozy chaos in here, for sure. But moments like this are what the word heartwarming was invented for.
Quinn’s eyes meet mine, and her lips quirk as I take a sip of cider, wrapped in the fluffy pink blanket. It is chilly in here without it. Maybe I can see now, though, how living in a drafty house with sketchy electrical and appliances that are always breaking down is tolerable when you have a mom like Lorraine to share it with.
I can suddenly picture birthdays and Christmases and anniversaries, snuggled together under fluffy blankets, drinking cider while a cake bakes in the oven, and I’m understanding more and more what family can really mean.
When Lorraine leaves the room, I say to Quinn, “You’ve been avoiding me today.”
“Yeah,” she admits.
“You turned off your location tracking.”
“Are you the only one who deserves privacy? Can’t I have any?”
“Of course you can,” I tell her, but it sticks in my throat. I hate giving her space.
These last two months—ever since finding out she’s pregnant, and everything becoming so tense between us, so fraught with uncertainty—have been two of the hardest of my entire life.
I’ve wanted her right next to me, the whole damn time.
“I understand why you’d want to keep living here and not move in with me,” I tell her, and she softens. “I may have been wrong about this old house. This may be the greatest place on earth.”
“I’m sorry I disappeared yesterday. After our conversation about Darla. The cat, I mean, and… everything. I needed time to think.”
“Quinn, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so cared for.”
She seems perplexed by this, but touched. “Your family must be really cold…” she jokes.
“Not cold. Just… not this, either.”
Lorraine comes in again. “I found this baby picture of Quinn.” She hands it to me. “Isn’t she the cutest, fattest little thing you’ve ever seen? She had such a big head! I used to call her my little bowling-ball-headed baby.”
“Nice, Mom,” Quinn says, unimpressed.
“She was just the roundest little thing?—”
“Mom. Don’t you have something to organize in the other room?”
“Okay, okay. I can take a hint.” Lorraine gives Quinn a look and says suggestively, “I’ll leave you two alone.”
“It’s always nice to see you, Lorraine,” I tell her as she leaves. “Thanks for the photo of baby Quinn.”
Quinn rolls her eyes. “Stop kissing up. She already adores you.”
I grin.
Then I study the photo of the happy baby Quinn, smiling at something off camera.
“What?” she says.
“Lorraine is going to be the best grandma. Better than both of mine were, for sure.”
Quinn tears up, but tries to hide it as she sips her cider. “She’s looking so forward to it.”
“I know that’s a hard topic for you…”
She lowers her voice. “The hardest thing is imagining my child not getting to meet their amazing grandma.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“I’ve just never felt like I can trust that. So I just take each day, one at a time. And do my best to appreciate it, no matter how good or bad it is.”
“I feel a little sad, too,” I admit, “when I think about the baby not getting to meet my dad. Though he wasn’t always so amazing.”
Quinn wipes away her unshed tears. She looks keenly interested. “You’ve never really told me anything about your parents.”
“Maybe I should.”
“Yes, please.”
“What, right now?”
“Yes?” She blinks at me hopefully.
Shit. Honesty, right?
I prepared myself for this.
I didn’t know I’d have to face it so soon. But Savannah was right. The clock is ticking, and I really should’ve stepped up with this. Like, yesterday. Or any of the days before, ever since I met Quinn and had chance after chance to let her really know me.
“Okay… if you want to hear it. I guess there’s a lot to say, actually.”
Quinn sips her cider and waits patiently. “I’m listening.”
I set my cider aside. “Well, probably the most important things I can tell you about my parents and my relationship with them all relate back to the fact that I’m dyslexic.”
She takes that in.
“Oh. Okay,” she says gently. I can tell she’s surprised. Maybe she had no idea.
I hope she’s not hurt that I never mentioned it before.
“I should add a caveat to that, that my dyslexia is undiagnosed. It’s just something I figured out about myself over time. Savannah helped me figure it out, actually. She’s the only one who knows.”
“I see. Go on.”
I take a deep breath and consider where to go from there.
“We grew up here, in Vancouver, in the house that Graysen still owns. As the only girl, Savannah was sort of favored by my mom. And I think I always felt like the misfit in the family. I got frustrated in school a lot, and acted out. My teachers would say things like, ‘he’s so capable, he’s just not applying himself’ or ‘he isn’t trying hard enough.’ It took me a long time to understand that I was able to memorize things, like how words looked, instead of actually learning how to spell.”
I pause, to let myself go back to that time, and try to remember things I really tried to forget over the years. So I can explain something, to her, that I’ve never really had to explain before.
“When I’d try to read, the words would move around on the page, and I’d have to focus really hard. It was exhausting. So I’d read comic books, because the small bits of text were so much easier to ingest. But when I’d try to write book reports on them, I’d get in trouble. I was told I was lazy. I just didn’t know how to explain what was happening when I tried to spell or read, because I didn’t know that other people learned differently than I did.”
“That sounds really frustrating,” Quinn says sympathetically.
“Yeah. I kind of hated school because of it. I had this one teacher who was super strict about spelling. I spelled the word ‘beautiful’ wrong on a quiz, and he made me stay after class and write it on the chalkboard, over and over. I can still spell it, but not because I actually learned how to spell. Because I can see it on that chalkboard in my head.”
“Huh,” she says, like she’s trying to picture it. “I don’t know if I understand the difference. If you see it, you see it, don’t you?”
“But I only see it because of that memory. If you asked me to write down the word beautiful, and I didn’t have that memory, I wouldn’t be able to sound it out and figure it out. I can’t ‘sound out’ words.”
I can see she’s trying to understand, but it’s hard for her to grasp.
“It’s really hard to explain. But I still write words like that in my head, over and over, and I don’t even know why. I think it’s like this overlap between the dyslexia and my OCD, this compulsive way of seeking control, putting the letters into place, over and over again. I write words with my fingertip constantly, but it’ll be one word over and over. A lot of the time, I don’t even know I’m doing it.”
“I’ve seen you do that, I think. Your fingertip moves. Sometimes when we’re lying together in bed, your hand is on me, and I think you’re asleep, but then your fingertip starts twitching.”
“Yeah. I can imagine it’s pretty annoying.”
I wish I could say I’d stop doing it, but I don’t know if that will ever be true. I’m not even sure I want to stop doing it, it’s such a part of me. And it is soothing, in a weird way, even though it doesn’t exactly soothe me. It’s something to focus my mind on when I’m otherwise stressing out. A false sense of control.
“It’s not annoying,” she says. “But you said no one knows? Your brothers don’t know? Your staff? People who work with you?”
“My brothers, no. They’ve always just poked at me about being lazy because my writing is sloppy. Some of my staff might suspect. But I’ve always found ways to work around it. And now I have so many people working under me who can take care of anything I need them to, it’s easy enough to cover the fact that I can’t spell worth shit. And spell check only goes so far. If I wrote an actual email to a business associate without one of my assistants or my secretary cleaning it up, people would think I was stupid.”
“They wouldn’t think that,” she says. “They’d just think you’re in a hurry, or you used dictation and it screwed up?—”
“Seriously, Quinn. People judge. When you suck at math, no one blinks an eye. But if you can’t spell common words, believe me, people think it’s a direct sign of lack of intelligence.”
She considers that. “And you never talked to anyone about this? Had it properly diagnosed?”
“No. I don’t feel like I need to. The writing’s on the wall. And it’s terrible.”
“Wow. Did you just make a self-deprecating joke?”
“I believe I did.”
She gazes at me, looking charmed. “Harlan Vance, who are you?”
“If you keep looking at me like that,” I flirt, “I’ll be anyone you want me to be.”
“Don’t flirt,” she says, but I know she likes it. “This is a serious conversation.”
“Well, there’s not much else to say about the dyslexia thing. I even told Savannah to stop sending me articles about it. I’m sort of over it.”
“But why? It’s not something to be ashamed of.”
I swallow. There’s that sharp shard feeling in my throat, the one that lodges there when I’m truly uncomfortable, and I know she’s hit a wound.
I am ashamed of it.
“Because it was the source of all my struggles and frustrations in school, and the frustrations with my dad. We’d argue about it all the time.”
Quinn’s eyebrows pinch. “He was hard on you because you struggled in school?”
“Always.” I take a breath, then dive right in. “Our last conversation, before he died, was an argument. He was angry with me for skipping classes, and I accused him of being harder on me than all my siblings. I truly thought I was his least favorite child, and I told him so. And he really seemed upset. The last thing he said to me was, ‘I have a harder time being your father than anyone else’s, because you’re so much like me.’ And then he told me that he loved me. That wasn’t something he normally said, at least not to me.” I hesitate before telling Quinn the full truth. “I didn’t say it back.”
“Oh, shit,” she says softly.
Then she sets her cider aside, unwraps herself from her blanket, and comes over. I open my blanket to let her in. She snuggles against me, wrapping her arm around my waist, and putting her head on my chest.
She just holds me for a long moment as it sinks in how much I needed her to.
It’s like she’s telling me, without words, that everything will be okay.
“What happened after that conversation?” she asks me gently, after a few minutes.
I just hold her and breathe for a few more moments, until I think I can get it all out.
“The next day, I was late coming home from school. I’d skipped English class again, so I knew I was in trouble, and I’d avoided coming home for dinner. I knew Dad was going to ream me out again. We’d argue, I’d get sent to my room, and then I’d sneak out later anyway.” I really don’t want to think about what happened next. But I promised myself I’d face it. For her. “But that wasn’t what happened.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” she says.
“I do.”
I rub my hand over my face, reliving those next few minutes. Not warped memories in an old, repeating dream. But real minutes that I actually lived. The worst in my life.
“When I got home, the house was quiet. One of the staff told me that my family was waiting for me up in my dad’s room. And I just got this terrible feeling. I went upstairs. My parents had separate bedrooms, and when I walked into my dad’s room, all my siblings and my mom were there, but Dad wasn’t. Mom was crying in Graysen’s arms. And they told me that Dad had died that morning, with two of his friends, in a helicopter crash.”
“Harlan… I’m so sorry. That’s just heartbreaking.” Quinn’s arm tightens around me. She looks up into my eyes; hers are watery and so blue. “I can tell that you feel guilty about it. But what happened, and the way things ended, were in no way your fault.”
“But maybe if I wasn’t making things so difficult for him at home, he would’ve been around more. Maybe, that morning, he wouldn’t have taken off in that helicopter.”
“No. That had nothing to do with you. You were a kid, and you were struggling. I’m sure your dad knew you loved him.”
“Maybe.”
“What about your mom?” she asks me.
I sigh. “I’d love to tell you that my relationship with my mom was much better, but I kind of swore to myself I wouldn’t lie to you anymore. So the truth is, I didn’t have a great relationship with her, either. After Dad died, she remarried one of his business associates, and she moved me, Savannah and Jameson with her to France, to live with our new stepdad and his kids.”
“Oh. That’s… a lot.”
“Yeah. I think she wanted a whole new life as her way of getting over what happened, but I wasn’t ready for that. To me, it felt like everything that was important to me got ripped away, so suddenly. I was struggling with grief and guilt, and in the middle of it all, my grandparents, my older brothers, they all let Mom take me away to another country. And even then, when I told Mom I wanted to live with her, she said boarding school was the best place for me to be. But maybe it was the best place for me to be for her .”
“I don’t get it,” Quinn says. “I don’t understand why she wouldn’t want you around. Especially after losing your dad.”
“She didn’t seem to want any of us around. I spent the next few years struggling to know where I fit in, and not belonging anywhere. Back home, Damian and Graysen got closer, and I drifted further away. And when Savi and I came back to Vancouver as adults, things were just never the same.”
“But maybe they could be,” she says. “Maybe you can get closer again. I’m sure your family loves you.”
“Then I guess I don’t really know what love is.” This is a brutal thing to say to a woman I’m hoping will love me. I know that. But I have to say it anyway. “But maybe that’s because I never really had any role models to show me what love is. For me, love was agony. Love was loss and abandonment and rejection. I couldn’t even understand why women I dated always wanted to get closer . It repelled me. I kept all my relationships surface-level. Even the girlfriend who left me because another man got her pregnant. I thought we might get married one day, because maybe I thought that’s all a marriage was; picking someone who you went through the motions of a life with. And after she betrayed me, I think I fucking gave up.”
“You didn’t, though,” Quinn says.
“I really did. I decided love wasn’t for me. There would be more agony and no more loss, because I’d keep nothing worth losing. I’d be stronger on my own.” I look into her blue eyes. “But you know what I learned last night, while watching a cat with a broken leg sleep?”
She smiles sadly. “What?”
“I’m really not as strong or hard or self-sufficient as I pretend. I like having someone to come home to. Someone who needs me, like I need them. The truth is, I get lonely sometimes, with only my grumpy-ass self for company. I just kept telling myself I’m not good with people, so I don’t feel like I need them.” I study her pretty face.
“But then this ridiculous, frustrating, incredible woman with turquoise hair came along. And you were right. I became a monster, for you. Overprotective, possessive, controlling. And when I got you pregnant, for a few minutes, I actually thought it was the worst thing that could happen. It was like my worst fear happening all over again. The baby might be someone else’s. And worse, if it wasn’t… I was terrified of fatherhood. But by then, I think I was already way more terrified of losing you.”
“It doesn’t have to be like that,” she says. “You don’t have to lose me. There can be other endings to our story, Harlan.”
“Yeah. I’m starting to see that.” I pull her closer, right into my lap. “I’ve been so afraid to let people in. But you’re already in. I’m crazy about you. And I’ll do anything it takes to fight for you, and win.” I take a deep breath, and promise her, “Except lie to you. Because more than anything, I want you to trust me. I want a family. I want you .”
“Of course you do,” she says easily, wrapping her arms around my neck. “I never believed that grumpy act for a minute.”
I consider that. I think she’s half teasing. But also, half serious.
“You know, it really was an act, in some ways,” I admit. “I think I’ve worked really hard to present this version of myself that seems perfectly in control all the time, to overcompensate for my shortcomings.”
“But your dyslexia is not a shortcoming. In some ways, I bet it’s even become your superpower. You had to find ways to work around it, right? You ran into problems, you learned how to find creative solutions. You figured out how to excel. Maybe that wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t dyslexic. Because it makes you see the world in a different way, and maybe that way is beautiful.”
I take that in, and I can’t refute it. “You have a beautiful way of making sense of things, Quinn Monroe.”
“Thank you.” She blows out a breath. “But believe me, I’m scared, too. Why do you think I work so hard? And I’m so fiercely independent? I’ve always feared being left alone. I don’t have siblings. It’s just me and Mom. And if Mom…”
“You don’t have to think like that,” I tell her. I place my hand gently on her little belly. “We’re all here right now. All four us. Together. Well, five, if you include the cat.”
She smiles at me. “Five of us. I like that.” She kisses me on the cheek.
“Jesus. How did I suddenly get a family of five?” I mutter. “Ten seconds ago, I was a bachelor.”
Quinn narrows her eyes at me. “Please. You haven’t been a bachelor since the moment you laid eyes on me.”
I gaze at her. “That’s weirdly true,” I admit.
“And you should really give yourself credit where it’s due. Because you’re already a great father. You’re doing it by showing up, taking care of me and the baby. And I hope our child is just like you, in so many ways.”
“I’d much rather they be like you.”
“I don’t think we get to pick…”
“It’s okay. It’s going to work out either way.”
“How do you know that?” she asks me softly, and I know she’s looking for reassurance.
So I tug her a little closer, and answer her as honestly as I can. “Because I think this is the first time in my life that I’ve ever felt like I have everything I need. And if that’s true, then no matter how imperfect I am, I know I’ll have a lot to give.”
She smiles thoughtfully.
“What?”
“This is what gives me hope for us, Harlan. Alone, each of us is a bit of a hot mess, in our own way?—”
“A bit?” I tease.
She narrows her pretty eyes at me. “But together, we somehow work, don’t you think?”
“I hope so.”
“Good. Then let’s be perfectly imperfect together. We’re family now, Harlan, no matter what happens. You’ll always be the father of my baby.”
I brush her soft hair from her cheek with my fingers, and cup her jaw. “There are going to be so many more cakes,” I promise her. “So many reasons for celebrating, together. Including Lorraine’s next birthday.”
She sniffles, fighting back tears. “I hope so.”
“And I know you like it here. But I was wondering if you and Lorraine would move into my house with me. You’d really be helping me out. It could really use a woman’s touch. I don’t even have a Christmas tree up. It’s sad.”
She swipes a tear from her eye. “I noticed.”
“Lorraine can have her own suite. She can even have an everything room. And we can make a nice room for the baby.”
“When were you thinking?”
“Yesterday.”
She laughs.
“If that’s too soon, sometime before the baby is born would be ideal. So we can bring him or her home, together.”
Her smile fades, and she chews on the side of her lip. “Shit. Now I feel bad.”
“Why?”
“Because, that cake I was decorating…” She gestures in the direction of the kitchen. “It’s a baby shower cake,” she says guiltily. “The girls are throwing me a shower next month, and I’ve been working on a practice cake. I thought I might also make it a gender reveal cake.”
“So, why would that make you feel bad?”
“Because, I didn’t tell you… You know that blood draw we did, for the paternity test?”
“Sure…” We both got the test results. Which confirmed that I’m the baby’s father.
“Well, with that same blood sample—my blood, I mean—they can look at the baby’s sex chromosomes. So, they can tell the baby’s gender.” She gazes at me with her open blue eyes.
“You know our baby’s gender?”
“Don’t be mad.”
“Why would I be mad?” I’m thrilled, actually.
“Because I asked them to email the result to me?” she says. “And I got the email yesterday. But I didn’t look, I swear. I was so mad at you, I considered peeking today. But I couldn’t do it. It felt wrong, like I’d be meeting our baby for the first time, and you weren’t there.”
“Oh.” I don’t know what to say. I’m really not mad. “Wait, though. I saw pink icing on that cake.”
“Yeah. I was going to do the whole thing pink and blue. And then maybe when we cut into it, everyone gets to see the reveal?”
“That could be cute…”
She blinks at me. She’s practically buzzing with excitement. “You don’t know how hard it’s been not to open that email.”
“So, then… we could open it together?”
“We could.”
“Like… right now?”
Quinn bites her lip again and pulls out her phone.
She opens the email, and we read it together.