I only hoped he’d learn to do the same.
Quinn
IT HAD BEEN two weeks since Lilly cut me out of her life, and I grew more and more miserable every day. She wouldn’t even look at me when I stopped by the school to pick up or drop off Sophia.
I’d gotten to the point where I was thankful to be on shift at the firehouse. At least I couldn’t fixate on Lilly when I was in the middle of fighting a fire. Things were slow at the station, today. Normally, I would have been happy for the down time, using it to catch up on sleep. But it seemed like every time I closed my eyes, the dream of the car crash came back, only this time, when I looked over into the passenger seat, it wasn’t my Addy that I saw there.
It was Lilly. And she was wearing the same heart-broken expression on her face that she had the day I went to the studio and saw her completely shatter.
I felt like I was losing my mind, being pulled in two directions. There was the part of me that felt unworthy of her love. I hadn’t been able to protect my wife three years ago. Hell, if not for me, she’d still be alive. I didn’t deserve another chance at love after failing so completely with Addison. Then there was the part of me that rebelled at the thought of letting Lilly go, which led to guilt at the thought of betraying my wife.
Not that it mattered, because she was finished. No matter how badly I wanted to hold on to the small piece of goodness Lilly offered, the soft ray of light in my dark world, I’d hurt her too much. She was done. And for the second time in my life, I’d lost the best thing that had ever happened to me.
I was a mess, and beating the hell out of the punching bag in the weight room of the fire department wasn’t helping like it usually would.
“You good there, Mallick?”
I looked over to find Tony watching me from his place on the weight bench. He was probably the closest thing I had to a friend within the department. Tony was about ten years older than me and had been with PFD for about fifteen years. I liked him, he was a decent guy, which was why I hadn’t minded picking up a shift for him a while back. I knew he was good to return the favor.
“Yeah,” I breathed heavily. “I’m good.”
He regarded me skeptically. “You sure? Because you look like you’re trying to drive your arm right through that bag. Won’t be much use in a fire if you snap a bone working out.”
Wrapping my arms around the bag to hold it steady, I dropped my forehead against it and worked to get my breathing under control before finally admitting, “It’s Lilly. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, man. I’m going crazy.”
“What about her?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “I thought you guys broke up.”
“I don’t even know if you can call what happened a breakup since we were barely together to begin with.” And if I hadn’t thought it was possible to feel worse than I already did, admitting that out loud just proved I was wrong.
“I’m not sure I’m following.”
I sighed and moved from the bag, ripping the tape from my knuckles before grabbing my water bottle and downing several long gulps. “We were together… we spent our free time with each other, we were sleeping together, but there wasn’t a label, you know? I just… I couldn’t put a name on it when it came to that.” Running my hands through my sweat-soaked hair, I dropped onto the bench across from him. “I cared about her… still fucking do, more than I should. But she said she loved me and I freaked. Ended whatever it was we had. Then her dad died and I couldn’t bring myself to stay away. She needed someone to lean on.” I paused as the memory of her breaking down gutted me. “I wanted to be that person for her.”
“So be that guy,” Tony answered with a shrug, like it was the easiest thing in the world. And I guess it was, for a family man like him. Tony had a wife who adored him and two little kids. To him it probably seemed as simple as breathing.
“It’s not that simple. I’ve got Sophia to think about.” It was a bullshit excuse, even I knew that. I dropped my head and studied my hands, the gold of my wedding band glinted in the overhead lights. “I can’t be the guy Lilly needs.”
“And what is it you think she needs?” he asked after several seconds of silence.
“A forever guy,” I replied honestly. “I can’t be that. I’m too fucking broken. I had forever once, and I lost it. She deserves better than being the woman I call when I start feeling lonely. She deserves a guy who’ll worship the fucking ground she walks on.” Even as I said it, the thought of her with another man made me damn near murderous. How fucked up was that?
“That what you want?” At his question, my eyes darted from my ring to Tony. “You want her to find some other guy? You think that’ll make what you’re dealing with right now easier?”
“Fuck no,” I growled in response, without thinking. It was purely instinctual.
“So, let me get this straight.” Tony leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees as he studied me. “For the first time since your wife passed, you finally found a girl who caught your eye. Not only that, but you actually liked being with her.”
I nodded, wondering where he was going with all this.
“So things start to develop between you two, and when she tells you she loves you, you freak, feel guilty because of Addy, and bail. But when something in her life knocked her down, you wanted to be the one she leaned on to get through the hard times, because despite feeling like you’re cheating on the memory of your dead wife, you still want this girl. How am I doing so far?”
“Uncannily accurate,” I grumbled and waited for him to finish his come-to-Jesus speech.
“Because you love her.”
At that, I froze. It wasn’t a question, it was a statement, and judging by the look on Tony’s face, he felt pretty damn confident in it. As he should, because he was right. I was in love with Lilly. I’d known for a while now, but the realization did nothing to ease the turmoil rolling around inside of me.
“I do,” I finally admitted out loud for the first time. “But I shouldn’t. It’s not right.”
The look on his face was one I hadn’t expected. I thought I’d have confused him, thrown him for a loop, but what I saw when I looked at him was understanding. He seemed to get it, which surprised to hell out of me.
And when he finally spoke, and revealed the truth behind that understanding in his eyes, I was floored. “You know, Sarah’s not my first wife.”
“What?”
He nodded as a wave of sadness passed over his face. “Yeah. I was married once before, right out of high school. She was…” he trailed off, seemingly lost in thought. “She was my everything. Never thought I’d have something like that with anyone else. Connie was it for me.”
My stomach dropped as I asked, “What happened?”
The smile he gave me was full of pain. “Two years into our marriage, she got pregnant. Didn’t think I could be any fucking happier than when I saw those two pink lines, man.” He laughed lightheartedly at the memory, and I found myself smiling along with him. And then the memory appeared to turn bad, because the happiness disappeared as he continued. “It was a rough pregnancy, but we were just so excited to finally meet our baby that we didn’t let it get to us, you know?”
“I know,” I said softly.
“She was already in her ninth month when she woke up bleeding one night. I rushed her to the hospital, but the placenta had torn, and she was bleeding so goddamned much…” He stopped for a while and breathed deeply, dropping his head in an attempt to compose himself. It took a few minutes, but I let him be, gave him the silence he needed to get himself to a better place. When he was ready to finish his story, he looked up. “I lost them both that night. My wife and my son.”
“Christ,” I breathed as my chest squeezed to an almost painful level. “Tony, fuck, I’m so sorry, man.”
I couldn’t imagine going through the same loss Tony had. If it hadn’t been for Sophia, I don’t think I would have made it. But he lost both of them. The fact that he was able to move
on from that spoke to the character of the man, and I had an entirely new level of respect for him. “I didn’t tell you my story because I wanted you to feel sorry for me. I told you because I get it. I know what you’re struggling with right now, Quinn. When I first met Sarah, I couldn’t imagine giving her that piece of myself that had belonged to Connie. It felt wrong. I felt like I was betraying her for falling for another woman. So I get what you’re going through.
“But having been in your shoes, I have a perspective on the situation that you can’t see yet. And if telling my story can help you move past this, I want to do that. I was just as broken as you are now, but falling for Sarah when I was at my lowest was the smartest fucking thing I’ve ever done. After I lost Connie and our son, I was barely living. I didn’t want to feel for Sarah the way I did, but she’d gotten under my skin. She burrowed deep and wouldn’t let go.” He gave a little chuckle before going on. “She saw the pain I was in and she wanted to help me. It didn’t start out as something romantic, it was just her wanting to be a friend.”
Christ, what he was saying was so much like what I’d gone through with Lilly. There’d been an attraction between us from the start, but it took a while for us to come to terms and act on it. We’d gotten to know each other on a totally different level first. We became friends. Best friends. She’d been what I hadn’t even realized I needed.
“That friendship grew into something else, and that scared the shit out of me,” Tony expressed. “I was where you are now. I fucked it up and almost lost her for good. But it took doing that for me to open my eyes and realize something. Loving Sarah didn’t mean what I had with Connie was any less important. Connie was everything I needed back then. I became an adult with her, learned responsibility, learned what it meant to be a real man and put someone else’s needs and wants above my own. She helped me grow into the man that was worthy of a woman like Sarah. She gave me exactly what I needed when I had her, and being with her taught me how to give Sarah exactly what she needs now. I don’t think I’d be where I am today without the lessons I learned with Connie.
“Some people aren’t lucky enough to find the love I had with Connie once in their lives. I was lucky enough to find that twice. How can that possibly be bad? If what you feel for Lilly is even a fraction of what I felt when I met Sarah, you need to grab hold of that, brother. Because I can promise you, Addy would want you to be happy. She’d want you to find a good woman who can take care of you and Sophia. If that woman is Lilly, don’t fuck it up and lose it because you’re scared. Every goddamned thing that matters in life is scary. Nothing worth having ever came easy. You and I learned that the hard way. But falling in love a second time doesn’t mean you’re devaluing the memory of your wife. It just means you’re one lucky bastard. Take all those lessons Addy taught you in the past and be the man Lilly needs today and every day in the future.”
I felt like I’d just taken a fist to the gut. It hurt to breathe as I admitted, “I think I might be too late on that, man. I hurt her. I fucking hurt her too many times. She’s done with me.” Christ, saying that out loud burned something fierce.
“She’s not done, Quinn.”
I looked over at him, my heart aching with each beat in my chest. “She is. She told me we weren’t good for each other.”
Tony stood and gave my shoulder a pat. “Then be good for her, man. She’s still here. She’s alive and breathing, and as long as that’s the case, it’s never done. Be the kind of man that’s good for her. Pull out all the stops to get that second chance, and I swear, it’ll be worth all the blood, sweat, and tears you put into it.”
I was thankful when he headed out of the weight room. I needed time to process everything he’d just said, and I wasn’t sure I could do that in the company of others. It took an hour for the wakeup call to fully penetrate. By the time a call came in for a small kitchen fire, and I was pulled from my inner musings, the battle that had been raging inside me for months suddenly seemed to disappear. I felt a sense of calm I hadn’t experiences in years. Finally, I knew what I had to do.
I had to be the man Lilly needed.
When we got back to the firehouse, I found Tony in the locker room. “Hey, I need a favor.”
He secured the towel around his hips and gave me a knowing grin. “Yeah? With what?”
“Think you can cover my next shift for me?”
That grin on his face grew into a full-blown smile as he answered, “I got you, brother. Go do what you need to do.”
I fully intended to do exactly that. I just hoped I could fix the damage done from trying to hold her at arms-length for so long, because I finally accepted that I couldn’t imagine a life without Lilly in it.
And I prayed that she felt the same.
Quinn
MY PALMS WERE sweating, the skin on the back of my neck tingling, as I made my way up the familiar walkway toward the front door. It had taken two weeks since my talk with Tony to set my plan into motion, but now that I was finally here, standing outside a house I’d come to know so well, I was second-guessing my decision.
I had no doubt they didn’t want to see me. They probably didn’t want to hear a word I had to say, but if I had any hope in fixing this deep, bottomless hole inside of me, if I had any hope of fixing myself and getting Lilly back, I needed to do this.
I closed my eyes and pulled in a deep calming breath. On an exhale, I reached out and pressed the doorbell, listening to the faint chimes echoing through the solid wood door.
The door opened and her eyes grew wide with shock. “Quinn. This is a surprise.”
“Janice,” I tipped my chin down. “How are you? I’m sorry to just drop by like this.”
“Is everything all right? Is Sophia okay?” She fidgeted nervously with the necklace she’d worn every day since Addison and I gave it to her as a birthday present. The locket held a picture of Addy as a baby on one side, and a picture of Sophia an hour after she was born on the other.
“Sophia’s fine, she’s with my parents.” I swallowed around the mass in my throat and asked, “Is Garrett home?”
She didn’t look any less confused as she stepped to the side to let me in. “Yes, of course. Come in. I’ll get him for you.”
“I actually need to speak to both of you. If that’s all right.” Janice led me into the living room. It looked exactly the same all these years later, and memories of all the happy times I’d spent here as part of my wife’s family assaulted my senses. I hadn’t been back to this house, back to Seattle, since I uprooted mine and Sophia’s lives and headed to Pembrooke. Being back here, surrounded by pictures of Addy was both painful and comforting all at the same time. It had taken a lot for me to not let the pain of the memories debilitate me, and I still had so much work to do but, thanks to the therapist I’d started seeing three times a week, I was learning to remember the good times I had with my wife, and tried to look beyond the guilt.
I didn’t want to let the past consume me anymore. And in order to do that, I needed to face this one particular obstacle. The biggest one I’d had yet.
“I’m not going to lie, Quinn. You’re kind of scaring me right now. It’s not like you to just show up here. Are you sure you’re okay?”
I offered a small smile to the woman I’d once loved like a second mother. To be honest, that love was still there, but I’d buried it under so much grief and despair, I’d forgotten how good it felt. “I’m trying to be,” I offered softly.
Something about that statement seemed to hit Janice, and she jerked back a step. Then, slowly, her eyes tearful, she nodded her head. “I’ll just go get Garrett,” she whispered, and disappeared down the hall.
As I waited, I made my way over to the mantle above the fireplace, studying the pictures I hadn’t seen in ages. I stopped when I came to one that made my heart squeeze in my chest.
Reaching out, I picked up a photo of Addy and me at our wedding reception, bringing it closer to my face. God, we were so happy. I remembered it like it was
yesterday. We were in the middle of our first dance as husband and wife. Everyone was watching as we moved across the floor, our heads bowed together as we whispered to each other, lost in our own little bubble. Halfway through the song, Addy gave me a playful smile and asked if I wanted to sneak any of the bottles of booze from the bar out under her skirts when the reception was over. I’d pulled back with a surprised laugh. She’d joined in seconds later, and the photographer captured the moment on camera.
After losing her, I’d forgotten what it was like to be that happy. I’d grown so accustomed to carrying my sorrow with me, I couldn’t remember what it was like to have my shoulders free of that miserable weight.
“If I remember correctly, you two stole away with about a thousand bucks of top-shelf booze in Addy’s dress that night.” My head jerked up at the sound of Garrett’s voice. I hadn’t even realized I was smiling, really and truly smiling, until I felt it slide from my face at the sight of him. I set the picture back on the mantle and turned to face my father-in-law. “Hello, Garrett.”
He tipped his head at me. “Quinn. What can we do for you, son?”
Son. Christ. I took a step back in shock at his casual use of that word. Son. I hadn’t heard that in so long. Hadn’t deserved it.
I cleared my throat, hoping to dislodge the emotions welling up inside of it. “Can we… can we sit? There are some things I’d like to say to you and Janice.”
He nodded, and he and his wife sat side by side on the sofa. I took the chair across from them, resting my elbows on my knees and wringing my hands together as I tried to recall the speech I had planned out for this very moment. But the words escaped me. I couldn’t even remember where to start.
“Fuck,” I hissed, raking my hands through my hair in frustration. “I don’t know how to do this,” I said, more to myself than to them.
“Do what, exactly?” Garrett asked, pulling me out of my head.
A Broken Soul (The Pembrooke Series Book 3) Page 22
