25. Chapter 25
Quinn
Cade Sullivan, it turns out, knows the ma?tre d' by name.
"Mr. Sullivan." The man at the door doesn't blink at the dirt still ground into Cade's pants, or the fact that it's nearly eleven on a Tuesday. "Your usual table?"
"Please."
I follow them through the restaurant, warm and quiet in the way that only happens when most of the city has gone home. White linen tablecloths. Low candles. The kind of place where the staff remains professionally incurious about why a playoff-winning catcher has grass stains on his knees.
"Your usual table?" I question, once we're seated.
"I come here after home games sometimes. It's quiet." He shakes out his napkin. "The staff doesn't ask questions."
"Questions like 'why is there still dirt on your uniform'?"
"Questions like 'shouldn't you be with your teammates?'" His mouth curves. "I'd rather be here."
I look at the tablecloth under my hands.
White linen, the kind Cade promised me back on the porch in Montana, when I was still wrapped up in all the reasons this couldn't happen.
I told myself it was the kind of thing you want and don't reach for — too professional, too complicated, too much to lose.
I read from that list every morning for eleven weeks.
Apparently I ran out of mornings.
"You actually did it," I say.
"Did what?"
I smooth my palm across the linen. "Found a tablecloth."
He looks at me across the candlelight — the same focused certainty I've been watching all night behind the plate, in the corridor, at the team celebration — but here there's no game to call, no crowd, no professional landscape to navigate. Just this.
"I promised," he says simply.
The waiter brings water and menus neither of us opens. I find myself looking at Cade's left hand resting on the table. The scar catches the candlelight, the small one I traced on clearance day and never asked about.
"The scar," I say, nodding toward it.
He glances down. "Fence post. Off-season after the shoulder. I was doing ranch work in Arizona, and I wasn't paying attention." He turns his palm slightly. "Twelve stitches."
"Did you have a PT?"
His mouth lifts at the corner. "I did."
"Let me guess. You told her it was fine."
"She didn't believe me either."
I laugh, and the last of the night's tension releases; the held breath of watching him play, the crowd noise still humming faintly in my ears, the careful composure I've been wearing since the first pitch. All of it goes at once.
"Graham welcomed you to the family tonight." I say it before I've really even decided to.
Cade is quiet for a moment. "Me?"
"To you." I look at the candle between us. "He wasn't talking about the Red Sox."
Cade absorbs that. "Quinn."
"He was claiming you, not just for me. For us. For the McKenzies." I turn my water glass in my hands. "Graham doesn't do that lightly. None of us do. We were all chosen, all five of us, adopted by a couple who didn't have to. That means we're careful about who we let in."
"I know."
"That's what got to me." I look up. "He didn't ask me first. He just decided.
Like it was already obvious." The tension I've been carrying since Graham raised his glass finally releases.
"I've been so focused on protecting what I built that I didn't notice he was already seeing the building of something bigger. "
Cade doesn't fill the silence. He's learned over these several weeks that I need to find the end of my own sentences.
He reaches across the table and takes my hand. Doesn't say anything for a moment, which is the right choice.
"Graham's been trying to give you that back for years," he says finally. "Long before I walked into your clinic. He just needed someone to give him an excuse." His thumb traces a slow circle on the back of my hand. "I'm glad I could be useful."
I look down at his hand over mine. And then I notice something that stops me entirely: my wrist. Bare.
No rubber band — not shifted up, not tucked under my sleeve.
Gone, left on my nightstand twelve days ago before I got dressed for the game, and I hadn't acknowledged until this exact moment that I'd done it on purpose.
"I left the band at home," I say.
Cade stills.
I turn my wrist over in the candlelight. "I guess I don't need it anymore. I think I've known that for a while. Tonight just felt like the right night to make it official."
He's looking at me the way he did in the barn, when I signed the form and closed the laptop. Like he's been waiting for this specific sentence and didn't want to rush it.
"The meticulous records," he says quietly.
"Exactly." I let out a breath. "I document everything twice. I keep excellent records." I meet his eyes. "The record shows that at some point in the last eleven weeks, I stopped needing it. I just had to catch up to what the data already said."
"Quinn McKenzie." His voice is low. "You have no idea."
"No idea what?"
"How long I've been trying to be worth that."
We order eventually, something off the menu I barely glanced at.
The restaurant empties around us while we're not paying attention.
We talk about things that have nothing to do with elbows or protocols or ethics policies.
But about his rookie year, the first time he called a perfect game, the apartment near Fenway he's lived in for four years and still has boxes he hasn't unpacked.
I tell him about the practice, the patients I genuinely like versus the ones I'm professionally obligated to treat with equal enthusiasm. He laughs at the distinction.
At some point I realize I've been talking for twenty minutes without calculating anything.
It's a strange feeling. Good strange.
We walk out somewhere past one in the morning, the Back Bay quiet around us. The air is cold and sharp, the kind that settles in once the postseason crowds have dispersed and the city remembers it has a rhythm beyond October baseball.
"More road trips over the next few weeks?" I say.
"Some, yeah." He takes my hand as we walk. "But I'm not leaving. At the end of every game series, I come back here. To you."
I turn that over quietly. I've always known this. But knowing it and letting it feel safe are different things, and somewhere in the last few weeks I've gotten very good at finding reasons it still might not work.
"I keep waiting for the complicated part," I admit.
"I know." His hand tightens around mine. "It might still come. But tonight it's just a walk home."
"And I'm coming back to this every night I'm in town." He squeezes my hand. "That's worth something."
It's worth a great deal, actually.
I stop walking and turn to face him on the sidewalk.
"I want to tell you something."
He stops too, fully present, eyes on mine.
"I've been trying to find a clinical way to say this, but there isn't one." I meet his eyes. "I'm glad you walked into my clinic. I'm glad Graham sent you to the ranch. And I'm glad I didn't talk myself out of what came after."
Cade is quiet for a long moment.
Then: "Quinn McKenzie. That is the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me."
"That was romantic?"
"From you? That was a declaration." He cups my face in both hands. "Don't change the language. I like the one you speak."
He kisses me on the sidewalk, unhurried, in the cold Boston air. When we break apart, his forehead rests against mine.
"Walk me home?" I say.
He doesn't hesitate. "Which way?"
"North. About six blocks."
His smile, against my temple, is warm. "Lead the way."
We walk north through the Back Bay, the city quiet. Fenway is dark somewhere behind us. The season has a few more weeks, more road trips, more nights where this is a phone call instead of a hand in mine.
But right now he's here, his hand warm in mine as we walk home through a city we both belong to.
For now, that's enough.
Six blocks north. His shoulder against mine. The city quiet around us. Nowhere else either of us needs to be.