Christmas in Cambria
Page 19
Chapter 29
Delilah had thought things would seem clearer after a good night’s sleep. The problem was, sleep didn’t come. She lay awake that night thinking about what Mitch had said. Had Quinn really chosen money over family? It was hard to believe, but they hadn’t known each other that long. What if Delilah was wrong about what kind of man he was?
After obsessing about that, she switched to the question of custody. Could Mitch really take her sons away from her? If she stopped seeing Quinn, would Mitch back off? And what about next time? Would he pull this every time she met someone? What would her life look like then? He got to be happy with Celine, but was Delilah doomed to a life of loneliness until the boys reached adulthood?
It wasn’t fair—none of it was. What was she supposed to do? How was she supposed to respond?
Delilah got up early, feeling exhausted and wrung-out. She made a strong pot of coffee while the kids slept and drank a cup on the back patio, watching the waves as she huddled under a thick blanket.
It was only six a.m. on the West Coast, but it was nine in Connecticut. Late enough to call Roxanne.
Delilah’s sister picked up on the first ring, immediately launching into chatter about Christmas and which of the relatives drank too much and embarrassed themselves.
“But that’s just like Sheila, isn’t it? God, I don’t know why Jim married her.”
It took a while before Roxanne slowed down enough to realize Delilah was crying.
“Oh, God. What’s going on? What happened?” she said when she finally understood Delilah hadn’t called to chat.
Delilah told her everything Mitch had said, every thought that had tormented her while she’d tried—and failed—to sleep.
“The thing is, I was happy.” Delilah dragged in a tearful breath. “I was really happy for the first time since I found out about Celine. I thought … I thought things were going to turn around for me. With Quinn. But now …” Her voice broke, and she squeezed her eyes shut with her free hand, willing herself not to lose her composure any more than she already had.
“That bastard. You can’t let him get away with this. You’ve got a lawyer, right?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll get you a better one. We’ll get you a team of them. That fucker is going to wish he was never born.”
That was why Delilah loved her sister. Roxanne was always on Team Delilah, no matter what. If Delilah were to ask Roxanne to help her hide a body, Roxanne would start researching methods of corpse disposal before she’d even hung up the phone.
“Thank you,” Delilah said, her voice shaky. “Really, thank you. I just … I just don’t know what to do from here.”
“Have you talked to Quinn about it?”
“Not yet. I wanted to get everything straight in my head first.”
Roxanne’s voice softened. “He might not have done what Mitch said he did. And if he did, he might have had a good reason. He deserves a chance to explain himself.”
Overhead, a flock of gulls glided by. Down on the rocks, a sea lion barked.
“I know,” Delilah said. “But that doesn’t help me, does it? Whatever he did or didn’t do, Mitch is going to make him sound awful in court, and I can’t go through that. It’s not fair to anyone—Jesse and Gavin, or Quinn. Or me.”
“He’s bluffing,” Roxanne said. “He doesn’t want to raise Jesse and Gavin. He never paid attention to them when you were married, and he doesn’t want them complicating his nice Parisian life now.”
Delilah had thought the same thing. But how sure was she? If she called his bluff and lost …
“Maybe,” she said. “You might be right. But … he would take them, Roxanne. Even if he doesn’t want them, he’d take them just to spite me. Just to prove he can.”
Later that day, while he was at home working on a new website project, Quinn got a text from Delilah.
It said, We need to talk.
All at once, he felt the earth open up beneath him. No good conversation with a woman had ever started with, We need to talk.
Might as well get it over with instead of spending his time worrying and wondering.
I’ll come over, he responded.
Better if I call you. I don’t want to get the kids excited and then disappoint them. Is this a good time?
So, the kids would be excited just to be disappointed, then. Terrific. She was definitely dumping him. The question was, why? And what could he do to stop it?
Because he knew he needed to stop it. The Ballard family was quickly becoming the center of his life, and he liked it. That had to mean something. That had to mean this relationship was worth fighting for.
He braced himself and typed, Sure. Let’s talk.
Then he got ready to have his heart ripped out.
Delilah put on a movie for the boys—one she knew would absorb their attention completely. Then she went onto the patio to call Quinn.
She was not going to cry—that was her main goal. If she could just keep her composure, this whole thing would go so much more smoothly.
Unfortunately, her resolve crumbled as soon as she heard his voice, and a tear slipped down her cheek. At least he couldn’t see that. Couldn’t see how broken she was.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
From the sound of her voice, he knew this was going to be bad.
“So, Mitch called me yesterday.” She took in a ragged breath and told him everything: the private investigator, the things Mitch had told her about Quinn, and the threat he’d made that if Delilah kept seeing Quinn, he’d sue for custody.
“He said you refused to help your brother with his medical bills even though you’d gotten a big inheritance, and even though he lost his house. Mitch said you didn’t even visit him in the hospital.”
“Alex had a heart attack? When? Is he okay?”
Delilah knew from his tone that he wasn’t faking this—he really hadn’t known.
“I’m not sure how he is,” she said. “Mitch said it was a year ago, but he didn’t tell me any details. You really didn’t know?”
“I really didn’t know. Jesus. They didn’t tell me. And he lost his house?”
Delilah dried her eyes with her fingertips and steadied herself. “Quinn, what’s going on with you and your family? Why didn’t they tell you? And why don’t you talk to them?”
She heard him moving around, maybe shifting his phone to the other ear or scrubbing at his face with his hand.
“Okay. Here’s the story. I did get an inheritance a few years ago, from my uncle. Who was gay. And who was disowned by the rest of the family for it. My mother and my brothers judged the shit out of him, and for what? Because he didn’t fit their idea of what a man should be? They told him he’d be welcomed back into the family if he quit his lifestyle. That’s what they called it. A lifestyle.”
He took in a breath and let it out in a ragged sigh. “I was the only one who stood by him, so, yeah, I was the one who got everything when he died. My brothers and my mother insisted that I split the money with them, and when I didn’t, they cut me off. The only time I hear from them is when my mother calls to try to shame me into giving them all their share. She calls it ‘their share,’ as though they’re entitled to it because of genetics. Because of blood.”
“Quinn, that’s awful.” Mitch’s report hadn’t included any of those relevant details.
“But,” Quinn went on, “I didn’t know Alex was in the hospital. I didn’t know he lost his house. Shit. I’d have tried to do … I don’t know. Something. I would have been there, at least, if they’d let me in the door.” He let out a weary groan. “So, that’s what all of those phone calls were about.”
He told her about hearing from Jared and a selection of other people from his past, all of them saying a man had been asking about him. Then he told her about getting the detective’s number from Mrs. Foster and how Quinn had been unable to reach him.
Hearing all of it made Delilah more angry at
Mitch than ever. What right did he have to poke around in Quinn’s life?
“Quinn, I’m so sorry. About what Mitch did, and also about your family. About everything.”
“Yeah, thanks. It’s been shit, honestly. And I didn’t tell you about it because … because things with you aren’t shit. They’re damned near perfect, and I just wanted to keep that part of my life away from this part, you know?”
She did know. She’d wanted to keep Quinn and Mitch as separate entities, planets with orbits that would never intersect. But things had a way of getting messy, didn’t they?
“Mitch is saying … he’s saying he’ll sue for custody if you and I don’t stop seeing each other. Because you’re a bad influence on the kids. He says he’ll take them to Paris.”
She was starting to tear up again just thinking about the possibility. She wiped a stray tear from her cheek with her fingertips.
“This isn’t about me,” he said. “Not really. It’s about him trying to control you, Delilah. And if you let him, he’s going to do it again the next time you meet someone. And again the time after that.”
“I know that.”
“If you give in, you’re never going to have your own life. You’re never—”
“I know that, Quinn! Don’t you think I know that?”
She’d raised her voice, which she hadn’t meant to do, especially with the boys just on the other side of the sliding glass door.
“So, what do you plan to do?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you have a lawyer lined up?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s good. Let’s go see him, and maybe we can—”
“I have to handle this alone.” She squeezed her eyes shut and fought to control her emotions, her breath. “I can’t involve you any more than you’re already in it.”
“Delilah—”
“I can’t risk it, Quinn. I can’t risk having you be part of this until I have a plan. Until I know what I’m going to do. If he takes Jesse and Gavin … They’re everything to me. They’re everything.” Her voice was a ragged whisper.
“I get that.”
“You do?”
“Of course I do. If those boys were my sons, I’d crawl through hell to protect them.”
If they were my sons.
Delilah had allowed herself to imagine just such a scenario. It had been so tempting. The idea had been so lovely—until Mitch had ruined it, the way he ruined everything.
“Then you understand why … why we have to stop seeing each other.”
He didn’t say anything for a long time. When he did, his tone was clipped. “You can’t just lay down and let him do this to you, Delilah. To us.”
But there couldn’t be an us. Not anymore. Not if it meant losing her children.
“I’m sorry,” she said, then disconnected the call.
Chapter 30
Quinn hadn’t known what to expect when Delilah said she needed to talk. But it wasn’t this.
She’d thought maybe he’d done something wrong that he didn’t know about. He’d been a lunkhead guy, offending her in some way he hadn’t realized.
That, he could have dealt with. He could have apologized. He could have learned from his mistakes and moved on.
But this? He couldn’t fix this, and he wasn’t sure it was even right to try. What if he convinced her to keep seeing him and then she lost her children?
He couldn’t let that happen.
And this was one of the reasons he hadn’t wanted to get involved with a single mother in the first place. He hadn’t imagined this exact scenario, but he’d sure as hell imagined one in which her baggage complicated things.
Except, her kids didn’t feel like baggage. They felt like wonderful people Quinn might never have the pleasure of seeing again.
He tried to go back to work on the website for his client, then pushed his keyboard aside.
He couldn’t think.
And, shit, Alex.
A heart attack?
Alex was older than Quinn by about fifteen years—he’d been the result of a teen pregnancy, while Quinn and Jared had come along later, when his parents’ lives were more stable. Still, Alex was young for a heart attack. He smoked, he never exercised, and he ate fatty foods, so Quinn guessed it wasn’t out of the range of the probable.
Still, it came as a shock.
Alex might have died without Quinn ever seeing him again. Was the grudge so important to Alex—and to the rest of his family, for that matter—that he would shut out his brother on his damned death bed?
It wasn’t his death bed, though. Alex had survived.
Which gave Quinn a second chance to work things out with his family, if he wanted to do it.
He just had to decide whether he wanted to do it.
Delilah spent the next couple of days trying to act happy and normal for Gavin and Jesse.
They weren’t fooled, though.
“What’s wrong with your face?” Jesse asked one afternoon.
“My face?” She put a hand to her cheek. “What do you mean?”
"It's all weird and scrunchy," Gavin said.
Was it? Delilah guessed she hadn’t been as good at hiding her emotions as she’d wanted to believe.
“I have allergies.” At least that would explain her red-rimmed eyes. “There’s something in the yard here, I guess.”
Quinn needed to be doing something about his situation. He just didn’t know what.
He couldn’t pressure Delilah, because she was under enough pressure already without him adding to it. And he couldn’t fly to Paris and punch her asshole ex in the face.
That left him at home, puttering around, trying to work but not accomplishing much, and brooding about the fact that he’d been, essentially, dumped.
He hated this. He hated being without Delilah, hated knowing that she was hurting and there was nothing he could do about it. He hated being so ineffectual. And he sure as hell hated the fact that the asshole ex—a guy he’d never met—had this kind of control over his life.
He hated that Alex was so angry with him that he’d face death without ever telling Quinn about it.
Well, at least that was an area where Quinn could take some kind of action.
He sat at his desk, stared at the screen on his laptop without really seeing it, then got up and packed an overnight bag.
He didn’t know if he was going to hug Alex or throw him out a window when he saw him. Given the man’s recent health problems, the hug was probably more advisable.
He guessed they’d just have to see what happened.
Delilah didn’t want to sit around and let her life get smashed to pieces, and she also didn’t want to allow Mitch to be the guy holding the sledgehammer—again.
She needed to know how to react to his threat, and she needed to come up with a plan for her future.
She didn’t know whether she and the boys were going to stay in Cambria, as planned, or return to Connecticut. But she did know one thing: she needed to take legal action now, proactively, instead of reacting later.
Delilah made an appointment for a video conference with her attorney a few days after Mitch’s threat. It was going to cost her three hundred and fifty dollars an hour, but, hell. It was money that used to belong to Mitch, so that seemed appropriate.
Dolly agreed to take the boys during the call, not only because Delilah needed to focus, but also because she didn’t want Jesse and Gavin to hear what she would be saying about their father.
It sucked to be the adult sometimes. It would be so much easier to rage against Mitch in front of any and all who cared to listen. But she had to be better than that. She had to think of her kids’ feelings before her own.
After lunch, Delilah took the boys to Dolly’s and called Miles Lawrence, whom she’d found through her parents.
Delilah wasn’t used to making video calls on her laptop, so it took some fiddling with the program to make the thing work.
“There you are! Are you seeing me clearly, Delilah?” he asked.
Miles had come into Delilah’s life after her parents had hired another, less bloodthirsty lawyer to draw up their wills. When Mitch had filed for divorce, they’d referred Delilah to their lawyer, who had sent her to Miles.
At first, she’d thought the older, portly, balding man—who came off as a grandfatherly type—wouldn’t be aggressive enough to represent her against Mitch and his considerable resources. But he’d gotten her a settlement she would have thought impossible and that had allowed her to quit her job and spend two months at Otter Bluff without worrying about her finances.
“I’m here. I can see you,” Delilah told him.
“Wonderful. Now, bring me up to speed on everything that’s happening. Have you spoken to Mitch again since our phone call?”
Delilah and Miles talked about Mitch’s threat, Quinn’s issues with his family, and Mitch’s relationship with his sons, until Miles was completely up to speed.
“It’s true that I haven’t known Quinn very long,” Delilah went on. “But Mitch is making Quinn out to be some horrible influence, and it’s just not true.”
“Okay. This is more common than you might think.” Miles jotted notes onto a yellow legal pad. “People often find it hard when their ex-spouse moves on to someone else.”
“But he moved on to someone else first!”
Miles chuckled, but with no amusement in his voice. “Yes, well. There’s no limit to the contradictions and complexities of the male ego.”
Delilah ignored that bit of wisdom.
“The question is, can he do this? Should I worry?”
Miles steepled his hands on his desk and regarded her over his half-glasses. “It will be an uphill climb for him to win custody in court, but it’s not impossible,” Miles said. “And in matters of custody, I find that you should always, always worry.”