Chapter 26
KATE
The man on the floor is trying not to make a scene about dying.
That’s what I remember most clearly.
“Give him some room,” a woman keeps saying, though she hasn’t moved back herself.
He claws at his collar, his fingers twisting helplessly. Red has mottled his throat, and when he tries to answer the three people asking if he’s choking, nothing comes out but a thin, terrible whistle.
“Don’t put your fingers in his mouth.” I catch the wrist of a man crouched beside him. “Did he eat something? What was on the plate?”
Everyone looks at the food as if it might confess, but no one provides an answer.
The man on the floor grabs my skirt, and his fingers yank so hard the fabric bites into the back of my knees. I drop beside him.
“Can you breathe?” The question is foolish even as I ask it. “No, don’t try to talk. Do you have medicine? An injector? Are you having an allergic reaction?”
His eyes shift toward the coat bunched under his hip.
I get my hand into one pocket and find keys, two pens, a roll of wintergreen mints.
The other pocket has a small plastic case in it.
Somebody behind me says an ambulance is coming.
Somebody else says we should wait for someone who knows what they’re doing, and I nearly agree.
The certainty in that stranger’s voice is stronger than the instructions printed on the injector.
I don’t know what I’m doing. But his grip loosens.
“No,” I say, my voice firm. “Hey, stay with me.”
I pull off the cap, press the injector against the outside of his thigh, and push until it clicks.
His whole body twists. I leave it in and count too quickly, lose my place, start over. The floor under my knees is sticky with spilled punch. The man’s face is sickly pale beneath the red, and I can hear my own voice telling him that help is coming.
By the time the paramedics shoulder through the crowd, he won’t let go of my hand.
“Sir, I need you to let go of her.”
One of the paramedics glances at me. “Are you with him?”
“I don’t know him.”
The man looks up at me, still fighting for each breath. Hurt crosses his face, which is absurd.
“Kate,” I tell him. “My name is Kate.”
His mouth silently shapes my name. Kate.
“What’s yours?”
It takes him two attempts. “Emmett.”
“All right, Emmett. They’re taking you to the hospital now.”
His grip tightens again.
“I can come,” I say.
I don’t know why I offer. I have an eight o’clock lecture.
He gives the slightest nod.
In the ambulance, he keeps his hand around two of my fingers. The paramedic asks him the same questions several times, and his answers come hoarse and halting. Peanuts. In the icing. Severely allergic.
Thirty years later, a peanut shell breaks between my fingers while a woman at county detention tells me she can’t confirm whether my mate is in the building.
Salt catches in the split beside my thumbnail and burns. Ouch.
“Explain your intake protocol to me, please,” I say, “because my husband, Gregory Quinn, left our home and never returned. Our son had to find out where he was because no one called me. I need to know if he’s been allowed a telephone call.
His shoulder was already troubling him, and if he was hurt when they took him in?—”
“Ma’am, I understand you’re upset.”
The pen stills over my notepad.
“I am upset. My husband is a good man. He doesn’t belong in jail.”
She probably hears that all the time.
“Detainees are given access to a phone after intake.”
“You’ve told me that. Four people have, in fact. Nobody will tell me why his intake is taking so long and why I haven’t heard his voice yet.”
“I can’t release information about an individual in custody.”
“Then tell me your name, please.”
She hesitates long enough that I write the time first. One seventeen, the numbers pressed so hard into the paper I’ll be able to read them on the next three pages.
“Officer Delaney.”
“Thank you. And your supervisor?”
“Isn’t available.”
“Of course not.”
“Mrs. Quinn?—”
“I’ll call again in half an hour. If your supervisor becomes available before then, you have my number.”
I bought the bag of peanuts months ago for a recipe I never made. I’ve already stress-eaten half the bag.
I push the shells into a pile with the side of my hand. The coffee Greg made yesterday is still on the bookshelf where he left it. He always leaves cups in strange places. On the windowsill behind the curtains. On the shelf in the shower.
The house still has his scent, strongest around his chair, but it has thinned since this morning. Every time a car slows outside, my heart lifts, and then plummets when it’s not him.
I empty his coffee in the sink.
The television is dark. Last night it showed Emmett standing behind a bank of microphones, asking for help bringing his daughter home.
His daughter.
I had crossed the room and turned it off. How could he do this to us?
“Kate.”
“No. We need to wait until we’ve spoken to Winston. We can call the attorney he recommended, and in the morning?—”
“I’m done waiting. The bastard put his own child in you. Our daughter spent five years in the woods—in the woods, Kate—because of him. There isn’t an attorney I can call who can fix any of that.”
“You’re right. It’s unforgivable, but we need to deal with this in the right way.”
“The right way is me kicking his ass, and then asking questions.” He was up and across the room, grabbing his keys. “And then I’m finding Bianca and bringing her home.”
“Greg, wait,” I demanded. “You can’t go over there like this.”
He dragged both hands over his face. Then he said, very quietly, “She’s not his.”
“I agree with you, but we need to find out where she is before you make this worse.”
He wrapped his large body around me. His warm scent usually settles me, but Bianca was still gone. “We’re going to get her back. For good.”
“You can’t touch him. You can’t threaten him. Don’t give him one more piece of our family he can use against us, do you understand me?”
Gregory glanced toward the television. “I need to talk to him while I look him in the eyes. I need to understand what he did to you and what he’s done to her.”
When he never returned, I called him nineteen times. Then I called the hospitals. Then Winston, who called back with the number for county detention.
My phone rings on the table now, making the shells jump.
“Tell me you’ve spoken to him.”
“No. I have somebody working on it, and I sent you three attorneys. Did you call?—”
“One has a conflict through Emmett’s foundation, one has an assistant who keeps promising to call me, and the third needs to check whether he is allowed to speak to me.
Your father is still in a cell, unless they’ve moved him somewhere else without telling us.
” I hear a scrape on his end, then the hard knock of a crutch.
Clara says his name, low and warning. “Why are you walking around?”
“I’m sitting down. Clara, I am. I was getting water.”
“Winston Theodore.”
“Mom, please don’t start. It’s been a long few days.”
“What happened?”
“Dad got himself arrested. That’s what happened.”
“What else?”
I can hear the soft murmur of Clara’s voice.
“Honey. Is it Bianca?”
“She’s fine, Mom.”
The peanut in my mouth turns to paste. I can’t swallow it.
“Winston, she’s my daughter. I need to know.”
“I need you to listen all the way through before you?—”
“For god’s sake, just tell me.”
He sighs. “After they ran from the estate, some men found her. She ended up in the water trying to escape. Tristan pulled her out. I’ve been checking on her. She’s okay.”
“Was she examined? Her lungs, Winston, if she inhaled water?—”
“They know what to watch for.”
“They? The same people who let these men find her?” I close my eyes. Maybe that’s not fair. “Where is she?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“This is bullshit, Winston. Wait until you have your own child, and you’ll understand.”
“I hear you, Mom.”
“Do you? Because everyone seems very comfortable letting that mean I get the telephone call afterward. I was understanding for five years, Winston. I didn’t show up in those woods and snatch her away when every part of me wanted to.
I took one careful call a week and one visit and told myself she needed the distance, because she said she did and I was trying, God, I was trying not to make what happened to her about what I needed.
But she almost drowned, and you’re giving me crumbs. ”
“She asked me not to give anyone a route to her.”
“So she doesn’t trust me?”
“I don’t know,” he says at last. “She just found out that Montgomery is her biological father, and that he was a part of your relationship with Dad.”
The grandfather clock in the corner chimes.
Gregory had liked him. I spent months noticing the two men circling each other whenever we were in the same room, only to come downstairs one Saturday and find them asleep at opposite ends of our sofa after staying up to watch a tennis match.
Gregory’s bare foot rested against Emmett’s thigh.
Empty beer bottles crowded the table, and the television played to nobody.
“Mom?”
“Once upon a time, we considered forming a pack.”
“Jesus.”
“But then I got pregnant with you, and your father became territorial. Emmett said he understood. I thought he did.”
After a while, the hurt faded. The weirdness went away.
Golf with Gregory. Dinner twice a month until the children made schedules ridiculous. Medical articles he’d dropped off folded beside my reading chair. We settled into a new normal that worked for us.
“Whitney was about three when he adopted her.” The first time I met her, she was a solemn little girl in a yellow raincoat, holding Emmett’s hand with both of hers. “I was relieved. Isn’t that awful? I thought he’d been lonely. I was glad he had her.”
“You never told us any of it.” He sighs, and there’s rustling in the background.
“What do I do?” I ask.
“Sit tight. Keep the doors locked.”
Clara says something close to the phone. Winston answers her softly, and I catch only the words in a minute.
“Put your legs up,” I tell him. “And listen to your omega.”