Page 30 of Quentin
Ciaran nodded. “Well, that’s not going to happen, and we should all be glad of it. The relationship between Silas and Samuel, the dirty money that changed hands—I know the distillery is struggling, and that could be the final nail in the coffin.”
Lowey hadn’t even considered it. She’d known that Quentin didn’t have the kind of money most people in Fontaine thought he did, but she just thought it was because he’d poured so much into purchasing the distillery. She didn’t know that the distillery itself was in trouble.
“I’m so sorry…I’m so sorry that I’ve put you all in the middle of this mess.”
Quentin closed his arms around her and whispered next to her ear. “You didn’t do this. You did nothing wrong…and as long as I’m with you, I’m right where I need to be.”
“But the business?—”
“Will be fine,” Quentin said. “The investor is in. We’ll have the capital we need to keep it going, and we’ll be just fine.”
He wasn’t just talking about the distillery. He was talking about them. She wanted to believe that, to know that now when their lives would supposedly go back to normal that this strange intimacy that had developed between them wouldcontinue. But there was no certainty there. No trust. He’d asked for a chance to build that. And she was going to give it to him. Lowey could only pray that she wouldn’t regret it.
“I just want to go home,” she said. “But I don’t even have one anymore. It’s as shot to hell as the bar.”
“Then you’ll just stay with me…not at the carriage house. At my house.”
There was no time for her to answer. A loud crash from the other room effectively shushed everyone. For a split second, but one that seemed to stretch on forever, everything went quiet. A pin drop would have sounded like a bomb. It was Mia who broke the spell.
“Mama,” she whispered, and then took off at a dead run for Patricia’s room with everyone else following behind her.
Lowey stopped in the doorway. Patricia was on the floor, having somehow rolled out of bed. It should have been impossible. Based on what she’d always been told about Patricia’s condition, it was impossible. And yet she lay there on the floor beside her hospital bed, eyes open and staring at all of them. But not sightlessly, not as if in some kind of fugue state. She was aware. She knew what was happening.
“Oh my god,” Quentin whispered, the words barely audible. “Oh my god.”
Clayton moved forward to lift her, but Annalee stopped him. “Don’t,” she said. “If she’s broken a bone, moving her might make it worse. Call 9-1-1, and we’ll have her taken to the hospital and checked.”
Quentin still stood frozen beside her, still disbelieving and rocked to the core by what he’d seen.
“Are you okay?” she asked him.
“She really is waking up,” Quentin murmured to her. “After all this time…somethingis happening.”
“It certainly seems that way…we’ll know more after they get her to the hospital.”
Mia was making the call. And then everything became a blur. Frenzied activity followed by waiting and then EMTs rushing in.
They were in the car and on the way to the hospital before they spoke again.
Quentin was driving, and Lowey was sitting silently in the passenger seat, wondering just how much drama one person could go through in the course of a few days. Breakups, reconciliations, death threats, murder attempts, being framed by the police, and the miraculous awakening of a woman from a decade-long coma. It was all too intense.
“It’s been a pretty crazy couple of days,” Quentin said, mirroring her thoughts. “But that’s not what we’re about.”
“How do we know? We don’t know what it’s like to be together when our lives are normal.”
He grinned. “If we’re together, baby, it will never be normal…I do love you, Lowey. It took walking out on you for me to figure it out. I don’t want to live the rest of my life being so afraid of losing what I love that I just won’t love anything.”
“I love you, too. And I knew it long before you walked out…so, it’s going to take me a while to get over the fact that you did. But I’m working on it.”
“When I said you could stay with me…what I really meant is that I want you to move in with me.”
Her mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. “Oh. That is not what I thought you meant.”
“This is the real deal, Lowey. You and me. I’d ask you to marry me, but you told me once that you never wanted to get married again.”
She had said that, but she was surprised he’d been paying enough attention to remember. “Never is kind of a strong word. I don’t want to get married right now…I think living together to see if we can do so without killing each other might be a good place to start.”
“I’ll help you pack tomorrow.”
