Quinn sighed.
Three episodes in, Dylan texted Tilly to meet him at the park so they could do homework. Her heart started pounding because he wasn’t sounding like a guy who’d told her they were no longer friends. It was further proof that he’d only told her that to get her to leave last night before she got hurt, and she quickly stood up. “I’m going out.”
“Where to?” Quinn asked.
“A party.”
“You’re fifteen,” Quinn said.
“It’s not like it’s going to be at a strip club or anything like that.”
“So where will it be?” Quinn asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“Uh-huh.” Quinn was looking unimpressed. “Who are you going with?”
Tilly shrugged.
“Gee, Tilly, I’m starting to feel pretty stupid for overreacting . . .”
Tilly blew out a sigh. “A friend needs help with homework.”
“Have that friend come here.”
“We’re going to meet at the park.”
“Or here.”
Tilly stared at Quinn, using her best resting bitch face.
Quinn gave it right back to her.
Tilly blew out a sigh. “Fine, whatever.” And she stormed off to her room, and for good measure, slammed the door. Two seconds later she got a text.
QUINN:
One time when I was fifteen and I slammed my door, my dad took the door off the hinges. Just FYI.
Tilly laughed in spite of herself. She didn’t answer. In fact, she deleted the text. But she was still half smiling when she climbed out her window and went to the park to meet Dylan.
He was a lone dark shadow sitting on a swing, his foot down and anchoring him to the sand beneath.
Feeling shaky with relief, Tilly sat next to him. She wanted to soak him up, but instead mirrored his position, head tipped back, staring at the stars.
“Tilly . . .” He blew out a sigh and she heard him shift and felt the weight of his gaze. She didn’t look. She was very busy counting the stars.
“Tilly,” he said again, voice low. Tense. Anguished. “I’m sorry.”
Her heart squeezed. Dammit.
“I hate that you saw me like that,” he said roughly. “I hate . . .” He paused and when he spoke, the words sounded like he had to drag them over shards of glass. “I hate that you know what my life’s like.”
Now her heart seemed swollen, unable to fit in her rib cage, and she turned to him, reaching out for his hand.
He hesitated and then took it in his bigger, callused one.
“And I hate it for you,” she whispered.
They sat like that for a long time, just watching the sky.
“I’ve got to go,” she finally said reluctantly, wanting to get back before Quinn found her missing and called in the Coast Guard. “My sister . . .” She paused, shocked by those two words she’d just uttered. Her sister. God. Crazy. “She doesn’t know I left.”
Dylan nodded. “I’ll walk you back.”
They stood and walked through the grass and stopped short at the lone car in the parking lot, lights off, engine running.
It was a Lexus, Quinn behind the wheel. She got out of the car. “Hi,” she said. “How did the homework go?”
Chapter 23
Stu(dying)
Stu(died)
Coincidence? I think not.
—from “The Mixed-Up Files of Tilly Adams’s Journal”
Quinn looked at the tall, lanky kid standing next to Tilly and had to sigh. “Dylan, I presume?”
He nodded and upped her opinion of him when he shook her hand, held eye contact, and said, “It was my fault. I needed to apologize to her.”
“For?”
Tilly shifted. “Dylan, no. You don’t have to—”
“For letting her put herself in danger for me when she came out to my dad’s house last night,” Dylan said over Tilly.
Quinn looked at her sister.
Tilly looked right back at her. “I’d do it again,” she said with such fierceness that Quinn knew she was missing more than a few pieces of this puzzle. She took in the fading bruise on Dylan’s face and filled in some of those pieces herself.
She drove them all to Carolyn’s house and waited inside while they said their good-byes, because Dylan insisted on walking home from there. When Tilly finally came in, she had a chip on her shoulder the size of the planet.
“Don’t start,” Tilly said.
“You could’ve just told me the truth about who you were meeting.”
“Right. And you’d have let me go?”
“Well, you’ll never know now, will you?” Quinn asked.
Tilly tossed up her hands and went to her room, once again slamming the door.
Good times.
But they were both in the same house, relatively unscathed, so Quinn decided to consider Day One a success. She fell onto the couch, exhausted, and looked at her phone when it vibrated with an incoming text.
MICK:
What are you up to?
QUINN:
Aren’t you supposed to ask what I’m wearing?
MICK:
I should’ve let you lead. Yes, what are you wearing?
QUINN:
Far too many clothes. You know, I don’t think I’m going to like being thirty.
MICK:
I could show you otherwise.
She had no doubt . . . He was a great distraction, one she dreamed of regularly. But he was also something else. He was dangerous to her heart and soul, and she knew it. She didn’t have the capacity to give a relationship with him what it deserved, and more than that, she didn’t want to.
Or, more accurately, she was working on not wanting to.
THE NEXT MORNING, Quinn took Tilly to school and then went over to the café. Greta was in the kitchen waving a frying pan and swearing in German, giving Quinn a bad flashback to Marcel.
“How can I help?” Quinn asked.
Greta gave her a long look. “Well, let’s see, I can’t send you out for eggs because you’ll cry, and I don’t dare ask you to go check the garden for fresh tomatoes because you’re allergic to bees, so—”
“Greta,” Trinee said from the other side of the counter. “I told you to drink your damn coffee before you try to masquerade as a human.”
“Fine.” Greta sniffed. “I’m sorry,” she said to Quinn. “She’s right. I need caffeine.”
“Go take a break,” Quinn said. “I’ll bring you a coffee.”
“That’d be super,” Greta said gratefully. “I’ll also take scrambled eggs, crispy bacon, crispy hash browns, and sourdough toast. Oh, and don’t bother with any of that ridiculous garnish.”
“You mean fruit?” Quinn asked dryly.
“That,” Greta said.
Quinn went to work, shocked by the sheer number of people who showed up for breakfast. “Where do all these people come from every day?” she asked in amazement to a running-harried Trinee.
“Truckers, ranchers, surfers, tourists,” she said, picking up her table’s food. “We get ’em all.”
It amazed Quinn. The place was run on a shoestring budget with antiquated equipment and—in her opinion—an antiquated menu, and yet it was widely beloved.
And then there was the other thing. She’d never worked harder in any kitchen than she had in this one on the few times she’d been cooking here, but . . . it was something she’d never expected—satisfying.