Page 77 of My Best Friend's Sister

I sighed. “Because I don’t want to disappoint you.”

His head fell to one side and his sharp blue eyes softened for a moment. “You’ve never disappointed me, Quinn.”

“I know. Because I’m afraid to. Because you’re all I have and because I’m all you have.”

His lips twitched as my words sank in, and I felt eleven all over again. Only this time, I hoped he would recognize that I was hurting and say something, anything. Anything besides suck it up, son. Don’t let your mother see you cry. Unfortunately, I suspected he was just as confused by my outburst as I was. After all, I wasn’t an emotional guy, and I finally understood why he raised me that way. Because lashing out like this felt bad and weird, and I hated it. I just couldn’t bottle my concern anymore. No matter how vulnerable voicing it made me feel.

“That may be true,” he said, as though it pained him to admit it. “But I didn’t raise you to be a sheep. I raised you to be a man who could think for himself.”

I scoffed.

“You disagree?”

“No, sir,” I said, adding the sir to make my point.

“You want to tell me what’s gotten into you?” he asked. “Did you meet a woman or something?”

My eyes shot up to his. The last time he’d mentioned women to me I was sixteen, and he came in my room, handed me a box of condoms, and told me if I knocked anyone up before I was thirty, it would ruin my life. “Why would you say that?”

He shrugged.

My neck inched forward.

“I had a breakdown of sorts when I met your mother.”

My mother. God, I was so thirsty for him to keep talking about her it made my heart ache. “I’m not having a breakdown.”

“Is that a no?”

“What happened when you met Mom?”

He took a deep breath and his eyes glassed over, making him look ten years younger for a second, but he shook the expression from his face immediately. Then he stared me down like he wasn’t sure he wanted to waste his breath.

“Please, Dad.”

He swallowed and leaned back in his high-backed chair, letting a thick blanket of silence envelope us before he spoke. “You know the story,” he began. “I met her at Arlington race track on the Fourth of July.”

I was so relieved to hear him talk about her I feared I might cry, but I held it together, trying not to seem so interested he’d get uncomfortable and cut the conversation short.

“And it wasn’t long before I was infatuated.”

I nodded, recalling the stories my mom used to tell about how he courted her with flowers and sweets. He even sent a barbershop quartet to her workplace on her birthday a few months later because he liked the way she blushed when she was embarrassed. Everybody did. Her cheeks used to go splotchy instead of uniformly red, just like they used to do if she had more than two glasses of wine.

“But the feelings I had for her scared the crap out of me. Feelings in general make me break out in hives, but I was so enchanted by her that I felt like I wasn’t in control for the first time in my life.” He shook his head and took a deep breath through his nose. “It was awful. I was convinced the frivolous feelings I had for her were making me lose focus at work, making me lose my edge. It was tough. Falling in love with her was draining and distracting in a way I wasn’t always sure I liked.”

My chest tightened. “How did you know she was worth the trouble?”

“I don’t know.” He looked up at the ceiling as if the words he was looking for might be hanging there. “I guess I liked that she saw the best in me, that she saw past the asshole I was and loved me anyway. Don’t get me wrong, I hated the way my love for her made me feel soft, but no one glorifies love for being comfortable.”

I thought of the way I stole the smile from Maddy’s face over a takeout pizza and a bullshit anniversary.

“Between you and me, if it weren’t for your mother, I probably would’ve gone my whole life without realizing birds sing and snow tastes good and sunsets are worth stopping for.” He glanced up again, his eyes shinier than before. “She was an angel. Is an angel.”

“You still miss her?” I asked, desperate to hear him say it. Desperate to hear him admit I wasn’t alone in my grief.

“Terribly,” he said. “I still miss her terribly.”

I bit the inside of my lip so the tears I’d been holding back for seventeen years wouldn’t spill from my eyes. It was stupid to feel that swell of emotion—as stupid as it was untimely—but it meant the world to me that that pain was shared, that he still cherished the memory of her as much as I did.

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