Chapter 23
TWENTY-THREE
Gabe
Once they were well beyond the city limits and the scenery shifted from urban sprawl to open countryside, conversation died away and everyone settled in for the long drive.
Quinn stared straight ahead, her gaze fixed on the verdant valley beyond, basking in a shaft of hazy sunshine now that the rain had finally passed.
Emma listened to music she had previously downloaded, since Gabe had set her mobile to airplane mode, Alex and Mia looked out the windows, and Max had fallen asleep.
Gabe welcomed the brief stretch of silence.
There had been no time to think or to plan; he had simply followed Sean Cadogan’s orders, as though he were a soldier and Sean his commanding officer.
He couldn’t afford to question Sean’s advice, or the decades of experience behind it, not when the stakes were so high.
Nor did he dare antagonize Quinn when she was already so on edge.
Still, he wondered if leaving had been the wisest course.
When people ran, they rarely escaped their problems; more often, they brought them along.
Gabe chuckled inwardly. People always said you married the person, not the family, but those people were either still single or married to orphans.
When he was a boy, he had longed for a sibling.
He’d imagined a brother or sister as a built-in best friend—someone who would care unconditionally and offer unwavering loyalty.
On some level, he’d still believed that when he’d married Quinn.
Over the past decade, however, he’d come to understand a harsher truth: No one resented you quite like your siblings did, and, in some of the more extreme cases, they acted on that resentment because they simply couldn’t help themselves.
Quinn’s extended family was a charming, extremely attractive, highly intelligent band of lunatics.
And that went for her biological father as well.
Seth Besson had raised and shielded the most remorseless sociopath of all, his only son, Brett, and Gabe couldn’t help but think that Seth had known more about Brett’s issues than he had let on.
Gabe sometimes wondered if someone’s lack of a moral compass was a result of nature or nurture.
If it was nature and the gene for moral deficiency got passed along, he thanked God that it had bypassed his wife and their children, who didn’t have a duplicitous bone in their little bodies.
Despite Quinn’s lack of guile and her boundless kindness to her long-lost kin, for a while there the lunatics had been running this asylum.
But the past few years had been relatively quiet.
Her twin sister, Jo, was gone, Brett was serving a life sentence for multiple crimes, and Seth was back in New Orleans.
Gabe had never liked or trusted Sylvia. That woman had made a string of questionable decisions, and he believed Quinn was better off without her birth mother’s expert gaslighting.
He’d never imagined Sylvia would die in the first weeks of the pandemic, though, and he regretted that Quinn still carried so many unresolved feelings about her.
Gabe liked Logan and Jude. Jude had clawed his way back from heroin addiction and managed to get his life on track.
Logan hadn’t been lucky in love, but he was a devoted and responsible dad.
Still, Gabe did not believe for a moment that what had happened to Logan was random.
Like his mother, Logan had a habit of making morally dubious choices that had the power to ruin other people’s lives.
The so-called surrogacy had not been nearly as straightforward as Logan liked to pretend.
In fact, it hadn’t truly been surrogacy at all.
Logan identified as gay and preferred male partners, but he’d been with women before.
Chrissy hadn’t just been a surrogate; she was Max’s biological mother.
And the child hadn’t been conceived in a clinic but the old-fashioned way.
In the UK, surrogacy was meant to be altruistic, and intended parents were expected to cover only the surrogate’s expenses and loss of earnings.
But Logan hadn’t gone through legal channels.
He’d simply handed Chrissy twenty grand to have his baby and walk away.
That was dodgy as hell—and not just morally.
In Britain, she couldn’t sign away her rights with a backroom deal, so if Chrissy changed her mind, or decided to squeeze Logan for more money, the whole thing could implode at any time.
And given that Chrissy had originally been Rafe’s friend, Gabe suspected this arrangement had created tension in the relationship, though he doubted it was the sole reason Logan and Rafe had ultimately split.
Rafe might have enjoyed being with an older man, but he hadn’t been ready for the responsibility of a child, especially one conceived through ethically murky means.
And Lord knew what else Logan might have been involved in.
Lately he had been flush with cash. Quinn assumed he had inherited the money from their mother, but what if there was a different, less legitimate explanation?
What had Logan done along the way that might now be catching up with him?
Whoever had come after him might not have been seasoned professionals, but they were no amateurs either—and they were clearly willing to take risks.
Quinn chose to see her remaining siblings through rose-colored glasses.
Gabe did not. Jude would always walk the narrow line between sobriety and relapse, and Logan would cut corners if it got him what he wanted.
And he had done in the past. Perhaps this time he’d messed with the wrong people.
And now Gabe’s family was in danger, and it was his responsibility to keep that sweet, vulnerable boy safe until either Logan resurfaced or they were forced to confront a far grimmer reality and decide what came next.
Gabe never admitted it aloud, but he spoke to his mother in his head all the time.
He missed her desperately and was consumed by guilt over leaving her alone in Berwick when the pandemic began.
He couldn’t have known how bad things would become, and he’d genuinely believed she would be safer in Northumberland than in London.
He’d made the wrong choice. Phoebe had died frightened and alone, with no one to hold her hand or offer comfort as she took her final breath.
Gabe didn’t believe in comforting stories about the afterlife, but he wanted to think his parents were together somewhere, and that they were proud of him.
They had been honorable, loving, trustworthy people, and he hoped they had died knowing they’d raised a decent man.
And as he sped down the motorway, the wind rising once again and the first drops of rain splattering against the windscreen, Gabe wished he could ask his mum for advice. And then, as clearly as if she were beside him, he heard her voice in his mind.
Protect your babies, Gabriel. And cherish Quinn. She’s more fragile than you realize.