After a Year of Silence novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: What Gwen Softened

Gwen cries and says she softened their angry words, they forgive her and set thirty days of terms, and Quinn shows up with the name on the hospice wire.

Gwen's office was on the other side of the glass wall from Quentin's, and her light was still on.

She looked up from her laptop when we walked in together.

I watched her face change from surprise to worry, and it was a good worry, fast and complete.

"Oh no," she said. "Did you two fight? Harper, honey, sit."

"Did I ask you to tell him not to come to my father's funeral?" I said.

Gwen's hands stopped on the keyboard.

"Did he tell you that I refused to come?" Quentin said. "Did you tell her that?"

Gwen closed her laptop slowly.

She looked at him, and then she looked at me.

Then her eyes filled, and she covered her mouth with one hand.

"I wondered when this would come out," she whispered.

Nobody spoke.

"I did it for you," she said. "For both of you."

Her voice shook.

"Harper, that week you were not okay. You called me at three in the morning and said that if he showed up you would scream at him in front of your whole family. You said, tell him I don't want him there."

"I was out of my mind," I said.

"I know you were. And Quentin, you said that if she didn't want you, you would not push. You said you would stay away as long as she needed."

"I said that," Quentin said slowly. "I did not say stay away for a year."

"I softened it." Gwen wiped her cheek. "Every message. I took out the worst parts so you could both stand to hear it. Then it just went on, and I did not know how to stop it."

The tears were real.

I could see them running into the corner of her mouth.

She reached for my hand across the desk, and I let her take it.

"I should have told you both to pick up a phone," she said. "I was so scared of making it worse."

Quentin put a hand on the back of her chair.

"Gwen," he said. "You should have told me she needed me."

"You're right," she said. "I know. I'm so sorry."

I looked at her wet face and thought of the soup she had carried to my apartment that month, still hot in its container.

She had sat on my kitchen floor with me.

She had stayed until I slept.

"It's all right," I heard myself say.

Gwen squeezed my fingers and laughed through her tears.

"I don't deserve you. Either of you."

She stood up and blew her nose and became briskly useful again.

"Okay. What do you need? I can clear your calendars. I can book a room."

"We need terms," Quentin said.

I looked at him.

"What?"

"If you're going to work for me and be married to me," he said, "you get to say how."

It was the first fair thing he had said all day.

So I said it.

"Thirty days," I said. "One dinner a week, and I pick the place."

"Done."

"You don't touch me unless I ask you to."

His jaw moved once.

"Done."

"You don't announce a single thing to anyone at this company. I decide who learns what and when."

"That one I hate," he said.

"Done?"

"Done."

"And you stay out of my department until I say otherwise."

"Harper, you report to me."

"On paper," I said.

Gwen was smiling.

"I'll write it all up so you can both sign," she said. "Just so there's no confusion this time."

She meant it kindly.

I went home to my apartment with the terms folded in my bag, tired to my bones, and let myself believe that it was nearly over.

At nine thirty there was a knock.

I opened the door expecting a neighbor and found my brother with a bar towel still over his shoulder and a folded paper in his hand.

Quinn had not shaved in three days and had not called in two weeks.

"Hey," he said. "I wasn't going to show you this."

"What is it?"

"Dad's hospice closed the account last week. They sent me the final statement."

He held out the paper.

"The whole bill was paid, Harper. Eleven weeks of care, the night nurse, everything. A wire came in the day after he died, from an account I had to look up."

He swallowed.

"It was Brightwell Freight."

I stared at the name at the bottom of the page.

The date was the morning after my father died, a full week before the funeral Quentin had not come to.

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