by Lily Everett
“Show’s over,” he said. “Bar’s closed. If you haven’t settled up yet, your drinks are on me. Now get out.”
*
Horrified, Quinn hurried over to the bar. This was all spinning out of control faster than she could keep up. “Marcus, wait, no, that’s not what I meant, it’s not what you think…”
“No?” Dabney Leeds slid off his bar stool with the help of his cane. “This young man thinks you’re dumping him after he went to the trouble of paying for your schooling so you could get the job at the barn. I’d throw your cute little butt out, too.”
“Oh, Dabney.” Miss Patty, Marcus’s older lady friend, clapped her hand over his mouth as if she could put the cat back in the bag. “I told you that in strictest confidence! Catch me ever telling you one of my secrets again.”
“A secret is just something you tell one person at a time.” Dabney cackled and let himself be led away by an apologetic Miss Patty. Everyone else in the bar slowly followed suit, gathering up their jackets and scarves and heading for the door while Quinn tried to make sense of what was happening.
“Is it true?” she asked Marcus.
He wouldn’t even meet her gaze. Just kept tidying up behind the bar as if she meant nothing to him. “You weren’t supposed to know.”
Shame burned up the back of her throat—or maybe that was acid, because suddenly Quinn thought she might throw up. “So that’s what was going on when you broke up with me the first time. You paid for me to have a new start and a new job to salve your conscience when you kicked me to the curb.”
“I anticipated the inevitable.” Marcus shrugged. “We weren’t going to last, so I made sure you had somewhere soft to land, and I let you go. Just like I’m doing this time.”
Quinn wanted to pull her hair out. She hadn’t been breaking up with Marcus this time! On the contrary, she’d been terrified that being put on the spot and talking about setting a date for their fake wedding—a date that happened to be about four days from now!—would make Marcus run for the hills. All she’d wanted to do was slow things down a bit, to give them time to be together as a real couple and find out where their relationship was heading.
But as of this moment, she was so angry, she wasn’t sure their relationship was heading anywhere at all. “You lied to me. Don’t give me any crap about how you just didn’t tell me everything—a lie of omission is still a lie. Oh my God, all the time we spent together at the barn, talking about my program, and you never said one word.”
“What does it matter now?” Marcus finished counting out the night’s take and slammed the drawer shut on the register. “We’re through. We both got what we wanted. It’s time to end it.”
“Sweetheart,” her father called softly from the door. Quinn looked around, realizing her parents and she were the only people left in the bar. “Maybe you should come on home with us.”
“No. You guys go on without me.” Quinn planted her feet. “I’m staying right here and having it out with Marcus.”
“Go home, Quinn.” He rounded the corner of the bar to flick off the neon beer signs while her parents reluctantly left. “It’s over.”
“It’s not over until you tell me why you never came clean about the money!”
“Screw the money,” Marcus growled. “I don’t give a crap about the money. I didn’t make that donation to insult you, I did it to help you.”
Quinn’s stomach clenched and lurched. “So I should be grateful? You think old man Leeds is right, I owe you something now? Because I never asked for your help! I wanted to make it on my own, Marcus, and you knew that. You, of all people.”
“Damn it, Quinn, don’t be an idiot.” Marcus’s eyes blazed in his still, grim face. “Of course you don’t owe me anything. We’re square. Which means I don’t owe you anything, either—including, I don’t owe you the chance to tear a strip off me in my own damn bar.”
She lifted her chin, swallowing hard to stave off the tears that threatened to burst free in an angry sob. “Tough, because I’m not leaving.”
His mouth worked silently for a long moment before he grabbed his leather jacket off the peg by the door and said, “Fine. If you won’t leave, I will.”
Frustrated and furious, she spat, “If you leave now, don’t expect me to stick around, waiting for you to come back.”
Marcus paused at the door. Without turning around, he said, “I never expected you to stick around, Quinn. And see? I was right.”
With that, he stalked out and slammed the door behind him, leaving Quinn alone in the dark, empty bar.
Chapter 19
Despite her angry threats, Quinn waited at the Buttercup Inn for hours. Tired down to her bones, aching with unspent emotion, she halfheartedly tidied up before going upstairs and using her old key to get into the room she’d rented across from Marcus’s apartment.
She curled up by the window and sat there, staring out at the alleyway, all night long.
But Marcus never came back.
When dawn broke, gray and misty with the onset of a spring storm, Quinn slowly picked herself up off the window seat. She felt old and stiff, her body cramped from spending too long in one position. Before she turned away, she caught a glimpse of her hazy reflection in the glass of the window. Her hair was a mess, her face a pale oval with dark smudges for eyes. She looked exactly how she felt … like the ghost of herself.
The ghost of a woman who had tasted happiness for the briefest of moments, and lost it almost as quickly as she found it.
Shaking her head to clear the morose thoughts, Quinn dragged herself down the stairs and out to her car, still parked next to Marcus’s truck in the back alley. The whole drive to her parents’ house, she was conscious of a tiny, flickering flame of very foolish hope that she’d find him there.
But of course when she pulled up and ran inside, all she found were her parents necking on the sofa like a couple of teenagers.
“You guys,” she said, covering her eyes with her hand. “Get a room! You have one right upstairs, in fact!”
Her parents didn’t spring apart like they’d been caught doing something naughty. In fact, going by the sounds, they exchanged one last, lingering kiss before Ingrid said, “Oh, sweetheart, you’re home. Are you all right? We were worried about you.”
Quinn dropped her hand and arched a brow. “Yes. I can see you’ve been up all night … worrying about me.”
Coloring delicately, Ingrid said, “What did you want us to do? Follow you around wringing our hands? Call you and demand you come home because you missed your curfew? You’re a grown woman, Quinn. You have every right to stay out all night, and to make your own decisions. Like calling off your engagement in public, in front of the entire town.”
Quinn flinched at the mild disapproval in her mother’s tone. “I didn’t mean to. You put us on the spot, and I panicked. And then Marcus got the wrong idea and then I got mad and made things worse…”
“I’m going to make some breakfast,” her father said, standing up. “How do cornmeal waffles sound? Quinn, you sit here and tell your mother all about it.”
“Wait, first I want to know—where’s Guru Ron?”
Her parents exchanged a speaking glance before her mother said primly, “We asked him to leave, and he did. He made a bit of a fuss, but we were firm. I think we’ve seen the last of Ron Burkey, Relationship Expert.”
“Then I guess it was all worth it,” Quinn said, with a shuddering breath.
Ingrid’s face went soft and worried. “Oh, my darling. Come here.”
As Quinn sank onto the couch and let her mother enfold her in those graceful, patchouli-scented arms, she took a moment to be so, so thankful that she had her parents back and happy. Without these people in her life, in her corner, and in her heart, Quinn didn’t know what she’d do.
Which made her think of Marcus, who was so alone, it made her throat close up. His mother and his mother figure, both gone. No relationship with his father. Who did Marcus have to comfort
him, when his whole world fell apart? She’d hoped she could be that person for him, someday.
Now, as she dropped her head onto her mother’s shoulder and finally let the tears come, Quinn couldn’t imagine how she’d ever been so stupid as to think Marcus Beckett would ever need her the way she needed him.
*
When Marcus grabbed his jacket and escaped the Buttercup Inn and the wreckage of his relationship with Quinn, he hadn’t had a clear plan in mind. With his hands in his pockets and his head down against the wind, he’d walked for hours in the dark, following Sanctuary’s winding one-lane roads and skirting the shoreline.
There were no stars, no moonlight to guide his steps, but it didn’t matter. Marcus didn’t have a destination. He didn’t care where he ended up.
Until he found himself at the familiar turnoff for Lantern Point.
He almost kept walking. There was nothing for him down that road. But stopping, even for a moment, had forced him to confront the fact that he was literally going nowhere. And though the sky was still as dark as midnight, a glance at his watch told him the sun would be up in an hour. He needed a place to stop and gather his thoughts, make a plan. But he couldn’t stand to see Quinn again, not yet. He needed a place she’d never think to look for him.
He stared down the road, glad it was too dark out to see much of the tidy little house at the very end of the lane, where Quinn was no doubt sleeping peacefully. He could have been there at her side, if he wasn’t so messed up. And whose fault was that?
Inexorably drawn, Marcus turned his focus onto the ramshackle place where he grew up. The way the shutters hung at angles and the paint peeled in ugly strips from the porch railing made Marcus’s stomach knot.
His mother had loved this house. He couldn’t believe his father had let it fall to ruin like this.
Actually, he could believe it, he reflected grimly as he strode up to the doorstep and contemplated whether to knock or simply walk in. His father had never cared about what happened at home, with his family. Dr. William Beckett had been an important surgeon, too busy saving lives to spend time with his kid.
He’d been too busy to make time to call his kid to come home in time to say good-bye to his dying mother. He’d started Marcus on this path, years ago, and until Marcus confronted him, he’d never be able to chart a new course.
Marcus’s hand curled into a fist and rapped loudly on the door.
For a long moment, there was only silence from inside the house. Then, with a loud creak, the door opened a crack.
“Marcus?” said his father’s voice, rough with disuse. “Is that you?”
The gap widened and Marcus faced his father for the first time since the day of his mother’s funeral. Dr. William Beckett looked … old.
Well, of course he did. It had been years, and from the state of the house, they seemed to have been hard years. But somehow, Marcus hadn’t expected the stooped shoulders and the wispy, wild shock of gray hair. He also hadn’t expected the sharp, completely aware and intelligent glint in his father’s heavy-lidded eyes.
“Hello, Dad.” Marcus fought the urge to stand at parade rest. This man wasn’t his commanding officer. He was barely Marcus’s father. “I have some things to say to you.”
“I didn’t expect you to come see me,” his father said thoughtfully. The hungry, avid way he stared made Marcus almost uncomfortable.
He wasn’t about to apologize for how long it had taken him to show up on his father’s porch. “Well, I’m here now. Are you going to let me in?”
The dad Marcus remembered would have glowered at that tone. But the older version only blinked and pushed the door wider to invite Marcus into the house.
“No luggage?” Will asked mildly.
“I’m not staying long.”
“Where’s that nice neighbor girl? Quinn? She said you were staying with her.”
“That’s over.” Marcus made sure his tone conveyed how final it was. “And it’s not what I’m here to talk about, so lay off.”
His father’s eyes flickered with interest, but he didn’t comment. Instead, he gestured up the dim staircase. “You remember where your bedroom is. It’s late. We can talk in the morning, if you want to get some sleep.”
Marcus knew he should be tired. And on some level, he was—exhausted right down to his bones. But he was grimly certain that if he lay down and closed his eyes, he’d do nothing but replay every moment he’d spent with Quinn on endless repeat. He couldn’t take that yet.
He’d put off this showdown with his father for long enough.
“I’m fine.” As he steeled himself to tear into his father, Marcus’s gaze caught on a photo of his mother propped atop the entryway table. He swallowed, imagining her soft, disappointed voice saying she’d raised him better than this. It made him waver as nothing else could have. “You go on up, if you want to catch a few more hours.”
“I don’t sleep much.” Will shrugged, still staring at Marcus as if he thought his son might disappear at any moment. “I have some work to do, actually. If you’re not ready to talk.”
Marcus’s lip wanted to curl. “Of course you do,” he said harshly. “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine without you. I always was.”
“Oh,” Will replied quietly. “I was going to ask if you wanted to see what I’m working on, but you don’t need to feel obligated.”
Guilt prickled at Marcus, and he hated it. This confrontation wasn’t going the way he’d imagined it. “You don’t need to entertain me. This isn’t a social call.”
“You said you wanted to talk…”
“Well, maybe I changed my mind,” Marcus said, too loudly.
Damn it. I can’t do this.
“I should go. Leave you to your work.”
His father seemed to shrink a little before his very eyes. “Okay. If you want to. But I wish you’d stay.”
Marcus gritted his teeth down on the words “You can’t make me.” He’d made that point a long time ago, when he was barely more than a kid. He was an adult now. He didn’t have to lash out, just because being back in this house made him feel as out of control as that kid had been.
Besides. Maybe the sight of his father, old and stooped and thinner than he remembered, had taken the edge off Marcus’s righteous anger. But that didn’t mean he had to ditch the man so soon. Marcus was tired of walking aimlessly, trying to outpace his own grim thoughts. He needed a place to rest, and this was as good a place as any.
“Fine,” he finally said, “I’ll stay. For a while.”
The sheer joy that brightened his father’s eyes took Marcus aback. “Wonderful, wonderful. I have something to show you. I’ve been waiting to show you…”
Rubbing his hands in happy anticipation, Dr. William Beckett faded quietly down the hall toward the nook, a glassed-in porch off the kitchen where Marcus’s mother had spent much of her time.
Quinn had been right, Marcus found as he followed his father slowly through the downstairs rooms. The striped wallpaper in the dining room was peeling at the corners. The air in the living room felt stale, as if it were hardly ever disturbed by anyone walking through it, but it wasn’t obviously dusty or dirty.
Marcus lingered over the photos arranged on top of the closed upright piano his mother used to play carols on at Christmas. In the cluster of pictures of his mother, by herself and smiling, holding a serious-faced baby Marcus, with her arm around her much taller high-school-graduate son, there were a number of empty frames.
Frowning, Marcus picked up a filigreed silver frame and tried to remember what photo used to fill it. But he couldn’t. All he could do was stare at the images of his mother, captured moments in time, and let grief seep into his heart.
It was an old grief, worn around the edges like a well-read book. Less intense, in some ways, than his fresh, spiky grief over Buttercup’s senseless death. But this was his mother, the woman who gave him life and taught him everything he knew about what it meant to be a good person in the world. Abo
ut how to love.
And he couldn’t help worrying, along with the deep and ever-present sadness of missing her, that she wouldn’t be any too impressed with how he was acting. Either with Quinn or with his father.
“I know, Mama,” he murmured, reaching out a fingertip to touch the bloom of her cheek beneath the glass. “I’m trying. But it’s harder than I thought it would be, this life stuff. I wish you were here.”
“I say that to her at least twice a day,” said his father from behind him.
Startled and angry at being observed, Marcus bumped the piano with his hip when he turned, and some of the frames fell over. Cursing, he bent to pick them up.
“Sorry,” Will apologized, taking a step into the room but then pausing to hover on the threshold. “I just came to ask if you’d drink some coffee. I was going to make it anyway.”
“I don’t want any coffee,” Marcus snarled.
“I know. You want your mother back,” Will said, voice shaking. “I want that too, son. But she’s gone.”
Marcus exploded to his feet, all the anger that had propelled him down the lane and into this house burning to life in his chest. “I know she’s gone. I’ve known since you called me up at college and told me she was dead, and I’d missed it. Missed my chance to see her one last time, to say good-bye, to tell her I loved her … you robbed me of that memory.”
“And you’ll never forgive me for it.” Will nodded, resigned. “I understand. I don’t blame you.”
Breath coming fast and furious, Marcus clenched and released his fists. “You never even said you were sorry.”
For the first time, Will looked surprised. “Because I’m not sorry.”
That was it. Flames. But before Marcus could detonate and blow his father, this house, this entire island to smithereens, his dad went on.
“It was what your mother wanted. She made me swear not to call you home. I carried out her last wish, even knowing you’d hate me for it, and I can’t regret that choice.”
