Page 76 of Finders Keepers
“It’s not there.” He drops both his gaze and his hands then, freeing me. His voice is soft now, pained. “Or it isn’t anymore. Because I already found it.”
34
“You…what?”
Quentin tries to take my hand again, but I shake him off. “Can we please get in the car and talk there? Mr. Aaron’s neighbors—”
“Are you serious? What do I care about Mr. Aaron’s neighbors?FuckMr. Aaron’s neighbors!” I shout. An older woman pruning a bush two houses down gives me a look of betrayal and shock. My cheeks go extremely hot. “Not you, sorry,” I tell her. “You’re lovely.” Quentin opens the passenger-side door, and I sink into the seat as if my blush weighs fifty pounds.
An even heavier silence settles as soon as we’re both inside the car. Quentin grabs the steering wheel and leans forward until his head is resting on it.
“Please start explaining yourself,” I say. “Because my mind is jumping to conclusions here.”
Quentin lets out a long sigh before looking back up and staring out the windshield. “I found it that summer. In 2008.” When he finally turns to me, his eyelids are heavy, as if talkingis beyond exhausting and all he wants to do is take a nice long nap. Except, no, it’s not tiredness. It’s…weariness. “And I have been keeping it from you ever since.”
“Jesus Christ, Quentin.”
“I know. Please…just let me finish explaining, okay? And then you can be as mad as you want.”
I stare him down for a good five seconds before glancing away, which he accepts as my agreement.
“Early that summer, sometime in June, I went to Sprangbur without you.”
“Why?”
I can see him deciding whether or not he has room to snap at me for interrupting already, before wisely letting it go. “I told you, I felt like I needed to do whatever it took to make you want to be my friend. And I had this ridiculous idea that if I could find the treasure, I could steer us away from it until the last second.”
“But why would you want to do that?” I demand. Then I remember everything he confessed the other night at Sprangbur and answer the question myself. “Because you convinced me to treasure hunt with you so we could spend the summer together, and you were worried we’d find it too quickly and I wouldn’t want to hang out anymore.”
“Yes. I’m not going to lie to you, Nina.” I flash him a look and he winces. “I’m not going to lie to youanymore,” he amends. “I didn’t actually expect to find it. I had no ideas of my own, nothing new to investigate. But you were so brilliant. You always have been. I figured it was only a matter of time until you cracked the riddle and we’d be done searching, and then I wouldn’t have an excuse to spend time with you.”
“That is so stupid, Quentin,” I say, burying my fingers in my hair.
“I’m very aware, thank you,” he says. “I spent a very hot, sweaty hour combing Sprangbur for anything we missed. I was just about to give up when I noticed a stone right at the top of the cenotaph, along the roof, that seemed oddly loose. There was a log at the edge of the woods, so I dragged it over and climbed up to get a better look. There was a circle engraved in the stone, which was weird because the rest of the design on that part of the wall was stars. I pulled on it and…There was a small compartment behind, lined with some sort of nonmagnetic metal. Inside was a canister, and inside that, wrapped up inside several pieces of waxed canvas, was a wooden puzzle box.”
“And?” I ask. “What was in it?”
“I don’t know. I never opened it.”
“Why not?”
“Because I didn’t want to do it without you,” he says, sounding distressed. “I meant it when I said I wanted the treasure to be something we did as a team. Sure, I was excited when I found it, because it meant I could keep us hunting all summer. But I was also so disappointed. Both in the fact that we hadn’t gotten to experience the moment together, and in myself for taking that away from us.”
He runs his fingers through his hair, making it stand on end. He looks absolutely as frazzled as I’m starting to feel. “I planned to re-hide it that last night, to try to re-create the moment with you. Then I would get to see your face light up…the way it started lighting up a minute ago before I made it go all…shuttered.” He buries his head in his hands. “God, my plans reallyhavealways sucked. And I’ve gone and fucked this all up. Again.”
There’s simply nothing I can say. All this time. All this time he’s been hiding the treasure. And the truth. All in some totally unnecessary attempt to get and keep my attention.
“I can’t believe you,” I say. “You’ve known where it was all along, and yet you let me spend weeks in Catoctin—weeks that I could have spent focused on rebuilding my life instead of wasting it.”
His head snaps back up now. “You have to be fucking kidding me,” he says with much more bitterness than I’m expecting. “Thisis why, Nina. This is why I did it! Because even now, even after everything we’ve said and done, everything we’ve shared, you’re so obsessed with this bizarre notion that you’re falling behind every moment you haven’t reached some nebulous ideal version of yourself, that the only way I get to spend time withyou—the person you truly are—is to trick you into it. Which sucks, because I happen to really fucking love the person you are, Nina. I always have and I always will, even if you don’t.”
“Don’t say that to me. Don’t say that you love me right now.”
“It’s only the truth.”
“All this time,” I whisper. “All this time you made me feel so horrible for going behind your back, but what do you call what you did, Quentin? You actuallyfoundthe treasure and kept it a secret from me. How is that not infinitely worse?”
“Itisworse. And I never said I didn’t forgive you. You just assumed. It’s true what I said before, that the reason I went silent was that you broke my heart and I was embarrassed. But then it was because I was absolutely, completely consumed by guilt. When I—in the police cruiser, when I said it was all a mistake, I was talking about whatIhad done. But you took itas…as about you, and the way your eyes filled with tears. My god, Nina. I’d seen my parents hurt each other with words countless times in my life, but I’d never once seen them make amends for it. I had no idea what to do. I figured I’d blown my chance to even be your friend, much less anything more.” His eyes close as if remembering the moment.
