She had been polite but firm. Her outbursts at him had occurred before and after the funeral. And since then, any contact he'd had with her had been distant, formal, and chilly. In her own way, she was as stubborn as he was. She had been furious with him for years anyway. She and her mother had discussed it endlessly, and despite all of her mother's efforts to soften her point of view, Alex had continued to maintain her harsh, judgmental position. She claimed her father had never been there, for any of them, not even when Doug died. Quinn had come home for three days for the funeral. He'd been in Bangkok, concluding a business deal, when he got the news, and turned around and left again the morning after the funeral, leaving eleven-year-old Alex and her mother to grieve and mourn, and cling to each other in their solitary anguish.
He had been gone for a month that time, putting together an enormous deal that had made headlines in the Wall Street Journal, returned briefly again, and then took off to spend two months in Hong Kong, London, Paris, Beijing, Berlin, Milan, New York, and Washington, D.C. Now that she was an adult, Alex said she could hardly ever remember seeing her father, let alone talking to him. Whenever he was home, he was too busy, exhausted and jet-lagged, and sleep-deprived, to spend time with her or her mother. And in the end, he had managed to cheat her of even a decent amount of time to say good-bye to her mother. Quinn had heard it all before, during, and after the funeral, and would never forget it. There was no turning back from what she'd said and the bitter portrait of him she had painted. And the worst of it was that, as he listened to her, Quinn knew without a doubt that he couldn't deny it. The man she described was in fact the person he had been then, and was until he retired. And whatever changes had occurred since then, most of them positive, Alex was not willing to acknowledge.
Quinn had tried to make up to Jane for the long years when he'd been busy and absent, and thought he had in some ways, as best he could, during the year and a half they had shared after he had retired. But there was no way he could make it up to Alex. It was also noticeable to him that she had married a man who scarcely left home, except to go to the office. She had married a Swiss banker right after college. They had gone to Yale together, and married almost minutes after they graduated, thirteen years before. They had two boys, lived in Geneva, and Quinn had commented to Jane right from the first that it was Alex who told Horst what to do, and what she wanted. They were inseparable, and seemed happy, sedate, and secure, though uninspired and unexciting. Quinn found his son-in-law painfully boring. Alex had been careful not to fall into the same trap she thought her mother had. Instead, she had married a weak man, to do her bidding, as different as possible from her father. Horst rarely, if ever, traveled, and worked in the bank his grandfather had founded. He was a responsible young man, who loved his wife and sons, and had no great ambitions. Alex had known when she married him that she would never be sacrificed to his career or accomplishments or passions. To Quinn's practiced eye, Horst had none. He simply existed, which was what Alex had wanted.
Her sons were six and nine, two beautiful little blue-eyed towheads, just like their mother, and Quinn scarcely knew them. Jane had gone to Geneva frequently to visit them, and Alex had brought the boys to San Francisco once a year to visit her mother, but Quinn had rarely been around when they came to town, and he always seemed to be in some other part of the world when Jane went to Geneva. Often, when Quinn was away, Jane took the opportunity to visit her daughter. Looking at it in retrospect, it was easy for him to see why Alex was angry. And she had no intention of letting her father make up for it, or atone for his sins, both real and perceived. As far as Alex was concerned, she had lost not one, but two parents. Quinn had died in her heart years before she had lost her mother. And the trauma of losing her brother when she was eleven years old had remained an open wound for her. It made her particularly protective of her children, despite her husband's pleas to give them just a little more freedom. Alex was convinced she knew better. And more than anything, because of her brother's accident, she hated sailboats.