“And . . .”
He shrugs. “I learned a very long time ago that it’s best for everyone if I try not to make sense of women.”
I shake my head, noting the wedding band on his left hand. “And your wife agrees with that?”
Quinn grins. “It’s my wife who taught me that lesson.”
“I’m not normally like this,” I explain. “I’m the level-headed one, but I don’t feel like I have control over anything in my life right now.”
“Do any of us ever really have control?” he asks.
“I’d like to think you do right now.”
Quinn nods slowly. “We’ll use that as an example then. I’m driving. I am in control of the car, but I have no control of anything else. I can’t control someone if they decide to change lanes or stop an animal if it decides to run into the road. Life is no different. I get planning since it’s literally what I have been trained to do, but even in a carefully constructed plan, control is nothing more than having the ability to adapt. If we don’t, we die.”
I turn my head to the side. “I feel like I’m dying.”
“That’s because you’re trying too hard to control the parts of the situation that can’t be controlled.”
“So, I’m supposed to just let it all happen, and then what?”
He glances over at me and then back to the road. “What options do you have? You can’t force your memory back.”
“No, but I can’t accept being lied to either. Not when I don’t know the truth.”
“And he lied . . .”
“Yeah.”
Quinn purses his lips and breathes heavily through his nose. “It sucks for all of you. My friends and I have gone through a lot of shit in our time. We’ve lost people we love, been hurt both emotionally and some of us physically. None of it was within our control. My wife and I...well, we went through the figurative version of hell. I didn’t think we would come back from it. I needed her to make me want to live, and she was shut away, wishing she could die to alleviate the pain. After I thought we’d turned a corner, she got on a plane and left me to go to California.”
I blink, seeing the similarity to my story. “And then what? Did you go after her?”
He shakes his head. “I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
Quinn pulls into the gas station, parks, and looks at me. “Is that what you want, Brie? You want him to be in a car a few miles behind us?”
My throat tightens, and the panic boils up. I can’t speak so I just barely move my head.
“I don’t know what he’ll do, but if he’s like me, he won’t. Not because he doesn’t want to or because he doesn’t love you more than anything in the world. And I promise you this, he would lay down his life if it meant you’d be happy. That is how I know he’ll wait for you.”
Those stupid tears threaten to come back when he tells me that Spencer loves me. He knows and believes it, even if I can’t get my mind around it. “How do you know?”
He leans over with a sly smile. “They pay me to be observant.” He then points out the windshield to a car parked facing the pumps. “That’s Jackson over there. I’m going to brief him. I want you to stay in here, lock the doors, and only open it if I say strawberry.”
“Strawberry?”
“It’s what I call my wife in Italian. Red, sweet, and rots if you leave it for too long. Like all women.”
I laugh and then lock the door as he instructed.
ChapterTwenty-Eight
SPENCER
Ihaven’t slept yet. I can’t. My mind is going in circles as I try to work this out.