Chapter 39 The Waiting Room
The Waiting Room
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done here?” Quinn says.
We are back on the veranda. I’m standing with Quinn by the outside bar, holding a cold bottle of beer against the side of my face. Holding it against my jaw. My jaw, which is throbbing and angry, the taste of blood still thick and metallic in my mouth.
Quinn stares at me, blank-eyed and completely unsympathetic. I’m not thinking about her though. Not really. I’m thinking about Nicholas.
The bar is as near as we can get to the back room—to whatever is happening in there between Nicholas and Frank. There are no windows looking in on them, no way to see for certain what is going on. The security guards are standing by the door, blocking the only way in. The only way out.
Nicholas is not more than twelve feet away from me—bleeding and injured. It might as well be twelve hundred.
I try to focus on Quinn, on the party happening around us. The party is in full force, like nothing awful is happening.
If anyone even heard the gunshot, you wouldn’t know, not from their actions. No one is picking up their kids and racing out. No one is doing anything but enjoying their wine and laughing. Music playing, appetizers being shared: Wagyu beef, porcini mushrooms, seafood platters.
Teddy is somewhere among them, pretending he didn’t just watch his father shoot someone. Maybe he’s managed to push it out of his mind—to convince himself that it will be handled, one way or another.
So maybe they heard nothing, at all. Maybe they have no idea something awful is happening. Or maybe that’s what you have to do to survive in this family—to survive existing on the edge of this kind of peril. You don’t see what you’re not supposed to see. You get practiced at looking the other way.
“This was all so fucking unnecessary,” Quinn says.
She shakes her head as the bartender places a shot of bourbon on the bar top in front of her. She downs it, motions for him to give her another.
I think of the utility workers ready to grab us, of everything that has happened since we chose to run.
“I’d argue the unnecessary part was you sending your henchman to my door. To my kid’s apartment,” I say. “But sure…”
“Please,” Quinn says. “Give me a break. Neither of you would have been hurt, just detained.”
“Well, I’m sure that would have been very pleasant,” I say. “Thank you for that clarification.”
“She would have survived it,” she says. “You both would have.”
“Once you got to my husband, you mean?”
“My point is,” she continues, “now this is all something else…”
I feel compelled to argue with her, but I know it won’t do any good.
I know that Quinn has no interest in hearing that this has, in fact, been something else—for me, for Bailey, for Owen—for quite a long time.
She won’t be able to hear me when what she cares about—when all Quinn cares about—is that now it threatens her too.
“Look, Quinn,” I say. “I realize that there is a long history here. And that there is no love lost between you and my husband.”
“You do? You realize that?”
I ignore her tone—her dismissal.
“Regardless…” I push on. “My understanding is that for you, at least, this wasn’t your original plan…”
“What the hell does that mean?”
I cycle through what I know to be true about her—that Quinn only stepped into a leadership position after her husband was sent away.
That Owen, in her mind, is the reason that happened.
So, perhaps, it isn’t just the loss of her husband that she blames Owen for.
It’s everything else too. It’s everything that her life might have been had she been allowed to sit on the sidelines of this world.
Everything that her life might have been if fate hadn’t stepped in to demand something else of her, to demand that she show up—the way she felt she needed to show up—for her family.
“It means that I understand it,” I say. “I understand you not wanting to be involved with your family’s business. You were headed in a different direction, correct? College, law school, an associate position at a prestigious law firm…”
“You think that means you know me? Because you know some biographical details about my past?”
“No. I would never presume that I know you,” I say. “I would just like it if you didn’t assume you know me.”
She narrows her eyes, and I worry that I’ve overstepped. That the opening I thought I’d found was the opposite. But then she starts to speak. For the first time, she starts to speak to me as opposed to at me.
“If what you’re getting at is that plans change, then yes,” she says. “My plans did change after Wesley was sent away. Which left my brother in charge on his own. My brother, who wasn’t equipped to handle the business, on his own…”
“I gathered.”
She offers a small laugh, almost in spite of herself.
“Then what are you asking me, really?” she says. “Why twenty years later I still blame your husband?”
“No. I can wrap my head around that part,” I say. “I assume you blame him because you think he started it.”
She doesn’t argue. She can’t. “Sure…”
“But what I’m saying is that you know, as well as I do, that my husband didn’t start this,” I say. “This started when Kate was killed on the side of the road.”
“That was an accident,” Quinn says.
But she looks upset when she says it. And I can see what she tries to hide on her face when she does—that maybe it doesn’t matter to her that I believe that. But it still matters to Quinn (more than she would like) that she gets to believe that herself.
It pulls me back to my conversation with Nicholas in the hotel suite last night—to the thing he didn’t want to admit. That moment that Nicholas let me know the organization was behind what happened to Kate on the side of the road.
Quinn is just as uncomfortable as I am to be going back to that moment because she knows that she can’t deny that. It doesn’t matter if she’s managed to convince herself that it was an accident—that Kate’s death wasn’t the intended result that afternoon. It doesn’t even matter if that’s true.
In one way or another, she and her family are the reason Kate died. In one way or another, all our fates were sealed when she did.
“Anyway,” Quinn says. “I don’t know what you think you’re driving toward here. That I should stop holding your husband responsible? That I’m the one who could’ve made a different choice?”
I consider what’s on that tablet, which impacts all of Quinn’s siblings who, either by action or inaction, tried making a different choice. It didn’t get any of them far enough away from where they started.
“I was actually going to say the opposite,” I say. “I was going to say that we all have fewer choices than we’d like. And your choice now, mine too, is down to just one. The same choice, really. For both of us.”
“And what’s that?”
“To end this,” I say. “Here.”
She pauses, as if considering that. And I know that, despite her posturing, she hears what I’m saying.
She has to hear what I’m saying. There’s a tablet full of reasons why her future depends on her hearing what I’m saying.
That this is our last chance to do it—both of us.
It’s our last chance to leave the past in the past, once and for all.
We have this in common. It may be the only thing we have in common. We have both spent our lives trying not to be at the mercy of what came before us. Trying, against the odds, to get our families to somewhere better.
“Maybe…” she says. “Maybe, that’s true for me and you. But nothing just ends. Not in this family.”
That stops me. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, there’s always a cost,” she says. “You get that by now, don’t you? When you come for my family, there’s always a cost.”
There’s always a cost. She holds on to the word cost, like a secret she’s not sure she will let me in on.
It would be easy to think that Quinn is simply trying to scare me—that she is trying to make me think that, even now, when she has no cards, she is still playing a game I don’t understand.
But it doesn’t feel like a bluff. It feels like the truth.
There’s always a cost. What will the cost of this be? It won’t be to me and Bailey. It can’t be. Owen has ensured that it won’t be to us. Quinn, despite herself, confirming the same.
She holds my gaze, not blinking, not turning away. But I turn away from her, looking down at the cliffs below, the whole of èze stretching out below. The cliffs and the houses. Frank’s house. Her father’s house.
I can feel her eyes still on me. But I keep my eyes on those cliffs, giving myself a moment to process, to figure out what she wants me to hear in what she’s not yet saying.
And so I don’t give it away—how deeply that’s penetrating.
Her threat. Her threat that sounds less like a threat and more like a fact. There’s always a cost.
If it won’t be us, then what will it be? A loud thumping in my ear, in my heart, in my shoulder. Where his wound is. Nicholas’s wound.
Because I start to know the answer. The answer inside this question: Will it be to Nicholas?
With all the talk today of our safety, not once did anyone discuss his safety. Not once was Nicholas mentioned.
And it starts to coalesce for me. There is always a cost when you come for this family. Nicholas would know this. He would know this better than anyone.
Of course, this would be the trade Nicholas is most willing to make, knowing he doesn’t have much time left. Isn’t that the trade he would willingly make, even if he had all the time in the world?
Nicholas would still make that trade for Bailey. We would all make that trade, without a moment’s hesitation, for our children.
I turn in the direction of the back room—toward those windows we can’t see through.
Quinn’s eyes following mine. She is as worried as I am about what is happening with Nicholas and her father.
Maybe for different reasons, but worried all the same: her fate is as locked up as mine in what is happening in that room.
This is when I realize something else. Or perhaps, I should say, when I realize someone else. Someone else who is involved in this. Someone else who, not unlike Nicholas, is willing to do what needs to be done to protect his children. Someone who would protect his children, even from themselves.
It hits me, like a bomb. The throbbing in my jaw. My heartbeat coming in behind it. The inside of that back room. All of it spinning together. Because I know it. Suddenly and irrevocably.
I know it, as sure as I’ve ever known anything: It isn’t just Owen and Nicholas who are behind this.