Daddy Next Door - The Complete Series Box Set (A Single Dad Navy SEAL Romance)

by Claire Adams

  My roommate was the opposite of me in many ways – an art major with a concentration in textiles – but she was also a gamer. I stood up to lead the way out the door.

  "Wait, you forgot your phone," Darla stopped me. "Ugh, I think your advisor is calling."

  I looked at the caller ID and bit my lip. Alice Bonton had a sixth sense about when I was going to do something fun instead of study. There was no reason I couldn’t let the call go to voicemail, except my father's nagging motto: never put off for tomorrow what you can deal with right now.

  "Ms. Alice, how is your evening?" I asked. Darla shrugged her shoulders and left without me.

  "Quinn, I'm glad I caught you. I mean, I'm not glad, I'm just grateful you answered your phone," my advisor said.

  "If this is about skipping class last week, its sounds much worse than it was. I was actually volunteering my time down at the blood drive. I just forgot to get a volunteer form signed," I said.

  "Skipping class again? That's the fourth time this month. That's once a week. Quinn, I'm concerned. I know this isn't the time to discuss it, but–" her voice cracked. "I'm not sure how to do this."

  "I can make up all the work, I promise. I'm studying right now. Literally, the book is open in front of me. I love nursing, I really do. I've just been distracted lately." I stopped myself before I started talking about the new game. My college advisor would not be impressed to hear how dedicated I was to a new online game.

  "When was the last time you went home? Spent any time with your family?"

  "I don't know, fall break? So, well, I guess about a month," I said. "But I'm going home for Thanksgiving. Sienna wants to stay on campus, but I agreed to go home. I'm in charge of making the gravy. Sienna makes the best stuffing, but she's only staying on campus to get a head start on studying for finals. She's pre-med and wants to be a surgeon."

  There was silence on the other end of the line. Finally, when I had held my breath long enough to see a few stars creeping around the edges of my vision, my advisor said, "I know you look up to your sister, but I hope you have considered finding your own path."

  I could feel dread hanging over the conversation. Ms. Alice's words were heavy and she struggled to speak. The same weight settled over me. "Am I getting kicked out of the nursing program?"

  "What?" my advisor asked. "No. I mean, I don't know, the skipping class is getting out of hand. I just think now is a good time for you to consider what you really want to do. You shouldn't stick with a major just because of family expectations. Instead of following in your sister's footsteps–"

  "Ms. Alice, are you alright? Maybe I should make an appointment during your office hours," I said. "I'm going online right now to put in the request. I don't want to take up any more of your time this evening."

  "Wait, Quinn, I'm calling late for a reason," my advisor said. She cleared her throat and paused again.

  "Oh no! You're right. I didn't know how late it was! I promised a friend I would cover his shift at the front desk of our dorm. I gotta go, Ms. Alice. I'm sorry. Thanks for your concern. We'll talk soon!" I hung up the phone and put it down as if it burned my hand.

  I was never rude and I never lied, but I had been both to Ms. Alice for no discernible reason. Something in her heavy tone and her pauses made me nervous. I looked at the clock. It was past ten o'clock on a weeknight. My stomach twisted. Why would my college advisor be calling so late?

  I stood up and brushed my hair back, doing my best impression of my sister's hair flip. Sienna never let other people bother her. My sister would have cut the strange phone call short twenty seconds after it started. On the other hand, I was wracked with guilt. I felt as if Ms. Alice was trying to tell me something and I had not done a good job of helping her spit it out.

  Despite the guilt, I brushed my hair and got ready to join Darla at the gamer party. I moved quickly and was out the door before I could even shut my abandoned textbook.

  "Oh, sorry. Excuse me," I said.

  The taller of the campus security guards held up both hands. "Whoa, slow down. Are you Quinn Thomas?"

  My stomach turned sour. "Yes?"

  "Your advisor is Alice Bonton?" he asked.

  "Yes. Wait, what's going on?" I asked.

  His rotund partner shoved his hands in his pockets and scowled. "Your advisor needs you to meet her at Alton Tower. We're here to give you a lift. That's all we know."

  "Please come with us, Ms. Thomas." The taller guard stepped aside and ushered me past.

  I took a step before I saw the sharp look pass between the two men. "What is this all about? Has something happened?"

  Neither said a single word more. I fought the urge to run and instead walked downstairs and out the front doors. The fat guard waved a thick hand towards the campus vehicle. My feet froze and an angry buzzing started in my ears. The taller guard stepped around me and opened the passenger side door, relegating his partner to the backseat.

  "Where are we going?" I asked.

  The lanky man folded himself into the driver's seat. Instead of answering, he turned the key in the ignition. I tried to close my eyes and take a calming breath, but an incessant flashing of lights stopped me. An ambulance drove past and joined the whirling lights of a police car not far away.

  Alton Tower. That's where the guard said my advisor was waiting. I knew it because it was my sister's dorm.

  The campus vehicle bucked the curb and drove right onto the lawn outside Alton Tower. Another campus security Jeep, the police car, and the ambulance blocked the front door of the dorm. I sat in the car, not sure where I was supposed to go.

  Ms. Alice appeared, skittering around the front of the police car. She ran up to my door, and I could see she was talking before she opened it. "Quinn, I'm so sorry, but I was afraid you wouldn't answer if I called back."

  "What is going on?" I asked. I gripped the side of the passenger seat and refused to get out.

  "There's been a… Um, well, an accident," my advisor said. She reached for my hand.

  "My sister? Is Sienna alright?" I slapped away Ms. Alice's hand and vaulted from the security vehicle. The rotund security guard tried to stop me, but he was too slow getting out of the backseat.

  "Wait, Quinn, stop. Let me tell you what happened," Ms. Alice said.

  The raw agony in her voice made me stop, but I could not turn around. She slipped around to stand in front of me and held out her hands. I crossed my arms tightly and waited for my advisor to speak.

  "Sienna committed suicide tonight."

  I laughed. The sound fired out of me. The two security guards backed off as if I brandished a gun. "That can't be right. Sienna would never do that."

  "Quinn, I'm so sorry. Her roommate came back from the library and found her in the bathtub–"

  "She slit her wrists?" I asked. The world was spinning away and getting smaller. It felt as if everything around me was shrinking onto a television screen and some terrible after school special was on.

  "Please, Quinn, come sit down," my advisor begged.

  I yanked my arm away from her reaching hands. Before my thoughts returned to my body, I had started running. I dodged around the ambulance before the fat guard could catch up. His lanky partner tried to cut me off on the front steps, but I spun out of his reach. The guards keeping the front hall clear were too shocked to move. I slammed into the stairwell and ran up two steps at a time.

  Sienna lived on the second floor at the end of the hall.

  "Quinn, no! That's her sister," Sienna's roommate cried as I ran past where she sat wrapped in a blanket in the stairwell. The EMTs in the doorway called out, but I could not stop.

  A detective in a gray suit looked up as I barreled through the door of Sienna's dorm room. His bright badge and ashen face stopped me.

  "Is it true?" I asked.

  "You're the sister?" he asked. His gray eyes swept towards the bathroom door. "I wouldn't."

  He made no move to stop me, seeming to understand that I had to see for mys
elf. I lurched towards the bathroom and stopped two feet short of the threshold. A wet puddle of bath water mixed with dark blood inched towards the door.

  Sienna was gone. My perfect sister with her flawless beauty and driving ambition was gone.

  I sank to the floor, unsure gravity could keep me from spinning away. I clung to the rug with both hands – Sienna's outrageously-priced woven rug she had begged our parents for last Christmas. I gritted my teeth and swallowed hard. Sienna would never forgive me if I threw up on her rug.

  #

  Sienna's dorm room was not more than a small box. The forensic photographer worked around me while two police officers joined the detective. They spoke at a regular volume, fully aware that shock had rendered me deaf to their words. I could not understand what they were saying.

  "Everything seems to line up: high pressure major, friends say she was very focused, her schedule is intense. There's no major event, no tipping point so far," one of the uniformed officers said.

  "Pretty typical," the detective agreed.

  I gripped the rug so hard I felt my knuckles creak. The tears were building, a hard pressure pounding in my head, but they would not come. Only ragged breaths escaped, and each one hurt my throat. I wanted to cry, I had no idea what else to do, but I could not.

  Sienna always knew what to do next. I always joked she would have made an excellent cruise director. At home, she had all of us scheduled down to the next five minutes during the holidays. I needed her to tell me what to do now.

  I gasped for air. The detective stepped to the door of the dorm room and waved an arm down the hallway. In a moment, one of the EMTs sat on the floor next to me.

  "Here," he said. "Take this. It’s a low dose anti-anxiety pill. It'll help calm you down."

  It was something to do, some small action to get me off the rug and standing on shaking legs. I took the pill and let the EMT help me up. He stood firmly between me and the bathroom and held out his arms to usher me out the dorm room. Two men and a black stretcher waited in the hallway.

  They were going to take Sienna's body away.

  "Can I go with? I want to go with," I asked the EMT.

  He shook his head. "Stop talking like that or you'll be overnight in the psych ward. You're going back to your dorm room to call your family."

  A warm numbness spread through my body as the EMT escorted me downstairs to the campus security guards. Everything seemed far away and soft. I imagined my life becoming a video game, the origin story of some dark superhero. The flashing lights of the police cars, the open doors of the ambulance, the arrival of the coroner's van, they were all on a screen. I was safe on the couch in my dorm room, dozing as I watched the introduction.

  If only it had all been a bad dream.

  And then, I was on my dorm room couch. My roommate paced the floor in front of me. Her long, delicate fingers weaving together and squeezing with nervous energy. She spoke to me, occasionally sat next to me and tried to talk, but I could not hear anything she said.

  "It's all over campus by now. I'm not sure you should stay here. People are going to be coming by and now's not the time. Right? Quinn?" she asked.

  Darla kept going to the door. She never opened it, just called through, but the knocks kept coming at regular intervals. I could feel Darla's nervousness growing. She wrung her hands and stood exhausted in the middle of our small room. In my hazy mind, she became the gatekeeper. Was I a prisoner or the hidden princess?

  Sienna had been the princess. My father called her Princess all the time. There was no way she would be sitting in a fog during a crisis like this one. She would have had everything organized by now.

  I felt like I could not even blink without a colossal effort.

  The next knock on the door was a rapid, insistent rap. Darla leapt to answer it and this time she pulled the door open. Alice Bonton slipped in our dorm room and locked the door behind her.

  "She hasn't called her parents yet. She hasn't even moved," Darla told Alice.

  "Quinn, honey, we need to call your parents. Let's do it now so they can come here and get you," my advisor said.

  I shook my head. Somehow this was all my advisor's fault. If I had not answered the phone call from her, none of this ever would have happened. Sienna would still be alive and studying her night away. And, I would be slipping into the world of Dark Flag with Darla at the gamer party.

  "I'm going to dial the phone and hand it to you, alright?" Ms. Alice asked.

  "What I am supposed to say?" I croaked. "They are never going to believe me."

  "Believe you?" she and Darla both asked at the same time.

  "Sienna would never do something like that," I said. The images came back to me and the room in front of me faded away to darkness. Every time I tried to think of why, how Sienna could do that to herself, a giant chasm opened in my mind.

  "Do you want me to tell them?" my advisor asked.

  The phone was ringing and my mouth went dry. I nodded just as I heard my father's voice.

  "Hello, Mr. Thomas? I'm sorry to be calling so late. This is Alice Bonton from UCLA. I'm your daughter Quinn's advisor. What? No, she hasn't done anything. Quinn is fine. I'm actually calling about Sienna."

  There was a long pause on our end. I assumed my father had launched into a righteous lecture about the rudeness of the late night phone call. He was a busy man, probably due in court early the next morning, and he did not put up with such thoughtlessness from people.

  If I had called, the lecture would have been the same.

  "Yes, I did say I was calling about Sienna," Ms. Alice said.

  And that was the difference. When it registered the phone call was about my sister, my father changed completely. I could almost hear him politely giving my advisor leave to speak, even though she stood a few feet away from me.

  "There is no easy way to tell you this, but there has been an accident and Sienna Thomas is dead," Ms. Alice said. She looked as if she had fumbled a live hand grenade. "No, you're right, I should be more specific. Your daughter was found in her dorm room bathtub. She had cut her wrists. She was pronounced dead at the scene."

  My father was a lawyer and must have switched into default mode because Ms. Alice spent the next ten minutes giving short, factual answers to his questions.

  Finally, she cleared her throat. "Sir, I have your other daughter here. Wouldn't you like to speak with her?" Ms. Alice did not wait, she just handed me the phone with a barely disguised expression of relief.

  He was still talking when I took the phone. "I'm going to need the name of the detective and the uniformed officers. I have her roommate's contact information somewhere."

  "Daddy?" I asked.

  "I'm going to have to lie to your mother until this is all cleared up. She can't handle news like this. We'll tell her Sienna was hurt in a car accident. I'll be there in the morning, Quinn. 8 am sharp in your lobby," he said.

  The line went dead. I dropped the phone on the floor and lay down on the couch. Darla pulled my comforter off my bed and laid it over me as I curled up in a ball.

  Somehow, my body woke up at 7:30 am. On autopilot, I showered and dressed and walked downstairs to meet my father.

  He was early and impatiently waiting. "Did you talk to her roommate last night?"

  "No."

  "But you went to her room? The detective said you were there," my father asked.

  "Yes. I saw, I saw…" I stopped and clung to the mailboxes in the foyer.

  My father pulled open the front door. He then grabbed my elbow and escorted me out in front of him. "We're going to the coroner's. Didn't you tell me you went there with your class? That's my girl, never flinching when there's something useful to learn."

  "That was Sienna," I said.

  My father scowled as he opened the car’s passenger side door for me. He scowled all the way to the county coroner's office. He wiped it away when the coroner met us at the door. The two men shook hands.

  "Has the death certifica
te been finished?" my father asked.

  "Yes, sir. My findings corroborate with the detective's conclusion. Her death has been ruled a suicide," the coroner said.

  For once, all the air seemed to be sucked from my father. I noticed how he had lost weight. There was more gray in his hair. The normal command he had over any room was gone and he followed the coroner without another word.

  We stood in front of a plated glass window and stared aimlessly into a small room. White tiles reached halfway up the wall before giving over to an institutional gray color. Two orderlies pushed a gurney into the room. On the coroner's signal, one lifted back the white sheet.

  There was Sienna, gray against the bleached white of the sheet. Her golden hair was combed back from her face and still damp from the medical examiner's administrations.

  "Sir?" the coroner called as I swayed.

  My father clamped onto my arm to steady me. "She was going to be a surgeon. She never flinched, never fainted." His eyes never left Sienna's face. "Her sister was going to follow in her footsteps but no one could catch up to her."

  "You've had a terrible shock," the coroner said to me. "Would you like to sit down?"

  "You're not going to faint are you? Surgeons don't faint," my father said.

  "I'm in the nursing program."

  He snorted. "Sienna was going to be a surgeon."

  I wrenched my arm free from my father's grip and sat on the bench the coroner had shown me. Anger burned in my chest, and I rubbed at the pain. My father had decided when we were still toddlers that his daughters would be doctors. Sienna had thrived under the challenge, basking in my father's approval as she excelled.

  I had always felt constricted, the square peg in a round hole. There was the pressure of his imperial expectations, the way he discussed it with everyone as if it was a foregone conclusion and not a hard achievement.

  Had the pressure finally been too much for Sienna? I wondered.

  My older sister had her ups and downs. Black rages and immobilizing bouts of depression. Sunny cheerfulness that lit up entire worlds and an infectious joy in her work. My father said it was a sign of a brilliant and passionate mind. Sienna worked hard, then needed to recover. Then, her love of the medical field would pull her back up.