by Lily Everett
Gritting his teeth, Marcus went doggedly back to the main point. “I hope you at least got the name of the woman who made the offer.”
“I did.” Quinn put her elbows on the table and leaned in, face flushed and eyes bright. “This is the part where we know for sure that it’s no coincidence.”
Marcus raised his brows, and Quinn nodded.
“Yep. The commercial real estate developer who made an offer on your father’s house is based in Taos, New Mexico. Where my parents met Dr. Ron.”
“What’s her name?”
“Amber,” Quinn said, with the slow satisfaction of someone dropping a bomb into the proceedings. “Amber Burkey.”
Chapter 15
Quinn was so full of interesting information, she felt like a water balloon about to splatter over someone’s head. Preferably Ron Burkey’s.
She hadn’t had the chance to speak to her parents yet about what she’d found out. Marcus thought they should hold off until they knew the whole story, to better convince her mother that Ron was a charlatan with ulterior motives. Quinn agreed, but even more than that, she wanted to go ahead with what they’d planned for that evening—the dedication of the now complete stone circle.
Quinn had big plans.
Mr. Marriage Guru, himself, stood at the edge of the completed circle of standing stones gazing around with a level of pride that seemed out of place for a man who hadn’t lifted a finger during the building process.
“Wonderful,” he cried, “simply wonderful. Exactly the way I pictured it.”
Quinn wondered if he’d pictured her family this way, too. Ranged around the circle they’d worked so hard on, her mother was barely looking at her father as he held a match to the pyramid of kindling in the center of the circle. Things were even strained between Quinn and Marcus, although they’d moved past his anger over her visit to his dad by basically pretending it never happened.
Which was frustrating enough, considering what she’d found out about Dr. William Beckett, but Marcus had made it clear he wasn’t ready, and goodness knew Quinn had enough of a challenge on her hands trying to cobble her own family back together. Marcus and his father would just have to wait their turn.
Unfortunately, it looked like they were in for a longer wait than she’d hoped. Her parents seemed more at odds than ever.
Maybe tonight would change that. Because tonight, they were blessing the stone circle by lighting the first fire in the center, a ritual Ron assured them was necessary to the proper functioning of the mystical energies.
The stones cast eerie shadows across the garden in the fading twilight. Ron’s eyes seemed to glitter like shards of quartz as he intoned, “Come into the circle.”
Holding back a shiver, Quinn stepped forward. She didn’t want to be affected by any of Ron’s silly nonsense, but there was truly something strange and powerful about this moment. Daddy stood up and joined them at the inner edge of the circle, standing between Mother and Marcus. Quinn met her father’s eyes over the flickering flames and gave him a commiserating smile. She could see how miserable he was, and for a terrible moment, she wanted to shake her mother. Why couldn’t Ingrid see her husband’s unhappiness?
But the truth was that Ingrid was unhappy, too. And that unhappiness made her blind to the unhappiness of others.
Quinn did her best to summon up some empathy for her mother, even though Ingrid was the one who’d gotten them into this mess. If it weren’t for Ron Burkey, they’d probably be drinking lemonade and playing cards like they used to in the evenings. This was all his fault.
She glared over at Ron, who didn’t notice. He was too busy shrugging off his pin-striped suit coat and laying it fussily over the bench just beyond the circle. Stepping back to his place and clearing his throat importantly, Ron said, “Now, do you all have your release items?”
“We do.” Quinn spoke up before anyone else could. “And I know your idea was that we should all bring something to burn that we could release into the universe—but we had some disagreement among ourselves about what things to release.”
He frowned. “I was very clear.”
Quinn blinked with all the innocent sweetness she could muster. “I’m sure you were! The confusion is probably my fault. I just couldn’t understand, from a therapeutic standpoint, why you would want us to bring something that represents an aspect of another person in the family that we’d like to get rid of. That sounds like a recipe for defensiveness and hurt feelings to me. So I thought you must mean that we should each be ready to burn an item from our pasts that represents an element that is currently blocking us from finding true happiness. That’s what you meant, isn’t it, Dr. Ron? Because I spoke to my teachers in the therapeutic riding program and they agreed that it sounded more likely. And more effective.”
Ron’s throat worked in silence for a long, heavy moment. Quinn hoped he got an ulcer from swallowing down all that impotent rage.
“Of course that’s what I meant,” he snapped, smoothing down his completely smooth hair with both hands. “Now, who wants to go first?”
Everyone turned simultaneously to look at Ingrid. Quinn was willing to bet her father and Marcus were going through the same thought process she was—namely, that this was Ingrid’s show, and she could darn well be the opening act.
“Oh, all right,” Quinn’s mother said, her hands fluttering nervously. One of them was curled tight, clutching a small object Quinn couldn’t make out in the leaping light of the bonfire.
Ingrid stepped forward, closer to the fire, and glanced at Ron for guidance.
“Well done, Ing,” Ron said unctuously. “You’re very brave. I know this is a highly charged and vulnerable moment, but all the greatest transitions in life and nature are made with difficulty. This is your chance to change what’s inside of you, which will naturally lead to a change in your outer behavior and circumstances. Everyone else, your role is merely to bear witness to Ingrid’s spiritual transformation. No words are needed from you at this time.”
That sounded a little overly optimistic to Quinn—real change, as she knew from hard experience, was a lot of work over a lot of time. You didn’t just decide things would be different and expect that to happen without any further effort on your part. But no real change was possible without that first moment of internal determination, so maybe this wouldn’t be a complete waste of time.
Even if she was still convinced that whatever Ron was planning for the land at the tip of Lantern Point, he had no idea what he was doing when it came to psychology.
Ingrid closed her eyes for a moment, swaying in the breeze that snapped sparks from the burning pine boughs. Her loose dress of natural linen appeared white in the darkness, making her look like one of the long-stemmed lilies she’d planted in the protection of the landward side of the house.
“I’m glad to go first, to set the tone for this evening. And also to thank you all for taking part.” She opened her eyes to look briefly into the eyes of each person around the fire. “I know it’s not what most of you would choose to be doing with your Sunday night, but Ron says it’s important. And goodness knows, it’s hard to get started, so that makes me think Ron must be right. Anyway, here goes.”
She took a deep breath and lifted her hands, opening them to show the item she’d brought to toss into the fire. It was a spool of hemp thread, dyed blue and coiled in the center of her palm.
Quinn remembered the period when her mother was obsessed with learning to weave her own clothes. She’d bought a loom and hundreds of pounds of wool and cotton and other natural fibers. She’d made one piece of clothing—an apron, if Quinn remembered correctly—and never made anything else. The loom sat in the living room corner now, unused and dusty, a monument to one of Ingrid’s short-lived enthusiasms. If her mother bringing this thread to burn meant she was finally willing to give up on the idea that she might go back to weaving one day, Quinn was all for it.
“Quinn and Paul know what this is,” Ingrid said with a wry s
mile. “But they don’t know what it represents to me. This thread, and the loom and other things I bought to play with, represent a time in my life that lasted for years. To tell the truth, it’s something I still struggle with. The idea that I need to do more, try harder, to make my life mean something. And I’m constantly failing, which is … disheartening.”
Quinn swallowed hard around the lump in her throat. Her mother looked so defeated. She’d never realized what was behind Ingrid’s mad passions and obsessive interests. Ron had told them all to be quiet and listen, but Quinn wanted so badly to ask her mother a ton of questions.
Why did she feel like a failure? How could she not know her life had meaning?
“I’m tired of it,” Ingrid said, lifting her chin. “I want to know that I’m enough. Whether I can weave my own fabrics, go vegan, learn to hot-air balloon, or write the definitive study of dream imagery—or if I don’t do anything more than grow the prettiest tulips on the island. I want to be enough, in and of myself. So I’m throwing away this prop, this external thing I thought would make me more than I am, because I don’t need it. Or at least, I don’t want to need it. Anymore.”
With trembling fingers, she dropped the spool of thread into the heart of the fire, where it instantly flared and blackened. Bowing her head, Ingrid stepped back to the stones, away from the spotlight of the fire, and Quinn had to restrain herself from clapping and cheering. She only managed because she was afraid her mother would think Quinn was mocking her.
But she wasn’t. That was beautiful, and Quinn felt she understood her mother better in that moment than she ever had before.
Quinn knew what it was like to worry about not making her mark—to feel sure that something more meaningful lay just around the next corner. She knew the disappointment, mostly in herself, of not finding that unknown something. She also knew she was lucky to have finally found what she’d been unconsciously searching for all her life, and it made her sad to know that her mother’s search had been much longer and more heartbreaking.
To show solidarity, when Ron asked who wanted to go next, Quinn steadied herself and said, “I’ll go.”
The fire beckoned her near, hot against her front while the evening air chilled her back. She’d thought about this moment a lot, ever since she came up with the way to turn Ron’s terrible idea on its head. She knew what she had to do, and she was ready. Quinn met Marcus’s gaze briefly before dropping her stare to the leaping flames.
This was a message for Marcus. She hoped he got it.
“First, I want to say how impressed I am with you, Mother. What you shared was beautiful, and it taught me something—not just about you, but about myself. We’re more alike than I ever thought.” Quinn smiled at her mother, whose lips trembled as she smiled back.
“And second…” Quinn paused to marvel at how nervous she was. “Sorry, everyone. This is going to smell.”
From the plastic bag at her feet, Quinn produced a battered pair of old sneakers and tossed them on the fire, one by one. The rubber soles smoked, the laces curling and twisting like snakes. Quinn was surprised by how much lighter she felt, all of a sudden.
“I’m through with running,” she announced, looking up from the fire and straight into Marcus’s shadowed silver eyes. “Not that I plan to stop moving forward or trying new things … but I’m ready to let myself be happy staying in one place for a while.”
With the right person, she wanted to say, but she chickened out. Ducking her head, Quinn stared at her charred running shoes and slid back a pace to get away from the glare of the fire. Hopefully if Marcus could make out her blush in the darkness, he’d attribute it to the heat.
The back of her neck prickled, cold or embarrassment or relief at being done with her part, Quinn didn’t know. Everything swirled together in a messy chaos of emotion. All she knew was that when she managed to glance up and meet Marcus’s gaze, he was smiling at her. Actually smiling, the slight, almost-unconscious quirk of his lips that he seemed to reserve especially for her.
Quinn’s heart lifted so much that she swore she felt her feet leave the ground for a moment. She clasped her hands behind her and rocked back on her heels with a grin.
Catching their silent exchange, Ron narrowed his eyes and said silkily, “Marcus, how about you? Are you ready to go next?”
*
Marcus didn’t even look at Ron. He had to look away from Quinn, too, as he came forward.
Even though she’d clearly meant for Marcus to watch her fire blessing and know she was speaking directly to him, what he had planned was also a gift for Quinn, in a way. He was going to confess something he’d never told another living soul, including the shrink who tried to get him to stay in the Secret Service after it all went down.
Marcus was damn glad he hadn’t had to go first. The intensely personal things Ingrid and Quinn shared had made it easier to open up.
In theory, anyway.
The fire popped and hissed, dry pine branches crackling inside the blaze while above their heads, the stars were starting to twinkle into sight as the last of the sunset faded. Marcus thought of another starlit night, one that had haunted him for more than a year.
Reaching into his jeans pocket, Marcus pulled out a small, hinged box made from a swirled seashell. The luminescent nacre of the shell’s surface gleamed pale pink in the firelight. He fingered the antique brass clasp, poking it with his thumb in a way he knew wouldn’t make it flip open. There was a trick to the thing, and he’d learned its secrets long ago.
For the briefest of moments, his fingers closed around the box too tightly, gripping almost hard enough to crack the fragile thing. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to let it drop. But, with an effort of will, Marcus opened his hand and allowed the pillbox to fall into the hottest part of the fire.
It felt like a part of his heart was tearing loose to follow it, to burn and blacken in the embers. Grief welled up in Marcus’s throat to sting at the backs of his eyes. Disbelief and horror clenched around his heart and he knew he couldn’t do this after all.
Without a word, he turned on his heel and strode away from the fire and into the cold darkness beyond the stone circle. Quinn called out to him, the distress and concern in her voice ratcheting the vise around his chest even tighter, but he didn’t stop. He couldn’t. He had to get away.
Even though he knew, from bitter experience, that there was nowhere he could go. There was no place that was safe from the memories locked in Marcus’s mind, or from the guilt that filled his soul.
Chapter 16
“No, no, let him go,” Ron commanded, seeming pleased at this dramatic turn of events. “The fire-blessing ritual can be powerfully unsettling. Not everyone is ready to stretch their spirit in this way. Your fiancé’s aura is very dark, Quinn. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you that.”
“Say whatever you want about his aura,” Quinn said impatiently, her eyes searching the shadowy garden for any sign of Marcus. “It couldn’t matter less to me. I need to go after him.”
But her mother stretched out an imploring hand. “Oh, sweetheart, I think he wanted some time alone! And your father hasn’t done his blessing yet. Can’t you please stay for that, and then go find Marcus, after he’s had a few minutes to gather himself?”
Quinn wavered. She knew Marcus, and he wouldn’t want anyone to see him overcome with whatever emotion had driven him away from the stone circle, not even Quinn. Maybe especially not Quinn. But that only made her want to find him more, to help him.
By forcing your presence on him when he clearly wants to be alone? a skeptical voice from the back of Quinn’s brain asked.
“Exactly,” Ron put in, waving his arms as if to dispel whatever “dark” energy Marcus had left behind. “Just what I was going to suggest. You wouldn’t want to miss your father’s blessing, would you? I’m sure it will be very moving.”
Three heads swiveled in Paul’s direction. Quinn was surprised and dismayed to see the grimace on her father’s face. H
e shuffled his feet a bit—he was all but tugging at the collar of his gray polo shirt. Quinn’s stomach sank.
“That’s okay, we can just call it a night,” Paul suggested weakly. “Quinn wants to make sure Marcus is all right. I understand completely. Go ahead, honey.”
Quinn didn’t move. “No. I’m going to give him a moment to himself. So you go ahead, Daddy. What did you bring from your past that you’d like to let go of?”
“Well, the thing is…” Paul trailed off, not really looking at anyone. “The thing is that I don’t really want to let go of the past. My memories are happy—I’m lucky, I’ve had a great life. As far as I’m concerned, if things went back to the way they used to be, everything would be perfect.”
Worried, Quinn darted a look at her mother to see how she was taking it. Next to Ingrid, Ron wore an expression of barely concealed delight, but the look on Quinn’s mother’s face … Quinn swallowed hard, fear piercing her chest like an arrow. Ingrid looked gutted.
“I don’t understand,” she said, her voice low but surprisingly steady. “There’s nothing you would change—about your life, about our marriage, about yourself? You’re perfectly content?”
Stubbornness firmed Paul’s jaw. “Yes. I’m content.”
“How can we both be in the same marriage?” Ingrid exploded. “You’re content, and I’ve never been so unhappy.”
The words billowed up into the night sky like the smoke from the fire, gone in an instant, but leaving behind the unmistakable residue of regret, sadness, and resentment. Quinn ached for her parents, both of them.
Even though she could cheerfully strangle her father in this moment.
“I don’t understand what changed,” Paul said, stubbornness giving way to helplessness. “I thought we were happy. Weren’t we happy?”
Ingrid wrapped her arms around her midsection as if she suddenly felt the chill of the evening breeze. “Of course we were. But things change and we have to adapt. And I know you don’t want to acknowledge it, but you aren’t happy now, Paul. You say you’re happy, but you’re not, and I can feel it. Don’t think you can fool me. You’re not happy, but the reason you didn’t bring anything to burn is because you don’t take this process seriously. You think I’m stupid for buying into it, you think it’s all a crock, but don’t you see that I’d do anything to save our marriage? To save us? And don’t you think it hurts to know that you … you won’t?”