Quinn didn’t want to believe it. He’d dozed briefly on the couch, and in his sleep had been woken by Dean, who had punched him in the shoulder and said, “What in hell are you doing on my couch? Your own bed not good enough for you?” Quinn had met the grin with his own, and reached out for his friend’s hand. He’d woken before they touched, and opened his eyes to an empty living room.
Down the hall, a bar of light still lay across the carpet. Mindy had never turned off the lamp. He wondered if she’d slept. Wasn’t sure if he cared. She’d known Dean for a year and a half, not a lifetime.
Dean and Quinn had been flung together as roommates in a foster home when Quinn was thirteen and Dean twelve. Almost twenty years ago. They’d had a fistfight the first day, grudgingly agreed to a truce the second day, and by the third Quinn had lied to protect the younger boy from their foster father’s wrath. Wrath, both had realized as the weeks and months went by, that was more show than reality; George Howie was a good man, as kind in a less demonstrative way as his wife. The two boys had been lucky in more ways than one. They’d been able to stay until, each in his turn, they’d graduated from high school. And they’d become close friends. Brothers.
As the night dragged on, Quinn had done his grieving, as much as he’d allow himself. His mother had taught him well that he couldn’t afford to be incapacitated by fear or sadness. He didn’t even know who his father was. His mother was an addict who’d progressed during his childhood from pills and pot to shooting up. She’d disappear for days at a time. He’d scrounge for food. By the time he was eight or nine he was shoplifting when the cupboards were bare. His mother got skinnier and skinnier, the tracks on her arms and legs livid, veins harder to find. He learned how to catch her at the perfect moment to get her to cash her welfare check so he could take some money before she spent it.
He remembered the last time he saw her, her eyes hectic.
“I feel like shit. I’ve got to score. Now, you go to school, hear? I might not be home tonight, but you can take care of yourself, right?”
She hadn’t waited for an answer. She’d known he could. He’d been doing it since he was six years old.
Only, that time she hadn’t come home. The police finally came knocking. She’d overdosed and was dead, they told him with faint sympathy. They’d looked at the squalor of the apartment and shaken their heads. Child Protective Services workers came to get him.
The Howies’ was Quinn’s fourth foster home. Either he did something wrong, or the people lost interest in fostering. One family decided to move to Virginia and didn’t offer to take him. Another one got nervous when their daughter turned eleven, started to get breasts and developed a crush on the brooding boy they were collecting state money for. Each time, he shrugged and moved on.
Until he finally found somebody to care about. Dean Fenton, a skinny boy with a copper-red cowlick and freckles on his nose.
“My mom’s coming back for me,” he’d always said.
Quinn tried at first telling him that she was probably dead like his mother, but Dean would throw fists and scream, “She’s not!” so Quinn took to shrugging and saying, “Yeah. Sure. Someday.”
The adult Dean had gotten drunk one night and said, “Yeah, she’s dead. I always knew. Give me hope over truth any day.”
Quinn drank a toast to that—hope over truth—even though he didn’t believe in fantasies. He’d have starved to death as a kid if he’d allowed himself to dream. You survived in this life by facing facts.
But Dean…Dean had softened Quinn. Made him laugh, acknowledge that sometimes faith in another person was justified.
They’d balanced each other, because Dean needed to be more of a cynic. The saving grace was that he listened to Quinn.
Had listened, Quinn corrected himself, lifting his head to look at that band of light on the carpet. Dean hadn’t wanted to hear a bad word about pretty Mindy Walker. Quinn had shrugged and shut his mouth, figuring the romance would pass. He could remember his shock when Dean had come over on a Sunday afternoon to watch the Seahawks play and said, “Congratulate me. Mindy agreed to marry me.”
They’d both said things they regretted then, but they’d patched up their friendship, and Quinn resigned himself to the inevitable divorce, something Dean wouldn’t take well after a lifetime of instability.
Now there wouldn’t be a divorce. Instead, there’d be a funeral. Quinn wouldn’t be listening to drunken soliloquies and supporting a staggering friend home. Instead, he was left with the grieving widow. A flighty, shallow girl-woman with spiky blond hair and a pierced belly button who played at arts and crafts.
Quinn let out a soft oath. Dean would expect his best friend to take care of his bewildered widow, the woman whose first thought hadn’t been of her husband, tragically struck down, but rather, “What will I do?”
“Damn you, Dean,” Quinn said under his breath. “Why her?”
CHAPTER TWO
MINDY AWAKENED RELUCTANTLY, knowing even before she surfaced that she didn’t want to face conscious knowledge of something.
Her eyes were glued shut and her face felt stiff. She was aware without moving that she wasn’t in her own bed. A hotel?
She pried her eyes open, then squeezed them shut. The guest room. Dean.
Oh, Dean.
Grief rushed over her, wave upon wave powerful enough to knock her down if she’d been standing. She gasped for breath and turned on her side to curl into a ball as if she could resist the emotional battery by making herself compact, by covering her head with her arms.
Nausea struck with the same force, making her shudder. She scrambled from bed and ran across the hall to the guest bathroom, having the presence of mind to turn on the ceiling fan before falling to her knees in front of the toilet and retching.
Clinging to the toilet seat, she emptied her stomach. At length she sat on the floor and leaned against the wall, her bent head laid on her forearms braced on her knees. She breathed. In through her nose, out through her mouth. Ordering herself, as if a function so basic had become a challenge.
Why hadn’t she told Dean? Why, oh, why keep to herself news that would have elated him? Eyes closed, she imagined his whoop of delight and huge grin.
She’d thought maybe this weekend. She just wanted to be sure. She’d always had irregular cycles. Being late this month might not have anything to do with that morning when he’d turned to her in bed and only later did they realize neither had used protection. But she’d thrown up every morning this week, and two days ago she’d bought a home pregnancy kit and watched the little strip turn pink.
She hadn’t told him because… Oh, she hardly knew. Because she hadn’t thought herself ready to have a baby, and she’d wanted to face what this meant to her and to her alone before she got swept up in Dean’s joy. Because she hadn’t totally trusted the kit and intended to repeat the results or get a proper pregnancy test in the doctor’s office first. Because she’d wanted to make sharing the news a special occasion that she’d vaguely seen as including candlelight and a romantic dinner. He’d been busy all week, distracted, exasperated at being shorthanded at work and unable to find qualified applicants for the position he had open. She’d waited for a better moment, a better mood.
All week, Mindy had hugged the secret to herself, not stirring from bed until he left the house because the instant she moved the nausea hit. She’d always been an early riser, and he had teased her about becoming a sloth, to which she’d wrinkled her nose and laughed because he hadn’t guessed.
Sitting on the cold bathroom floor, Mindy cried until exhaustion made her blessedly numb. Then she dragged herself up, peered without interest through swollen eyes at the mirror, and splashed cold water over her blotchy face. Her hair poked out