Love in Slow Motion

42. Quinn

42 QUINN

Everything is different in the light of morning. It’s like in the last twenty-four hours, I’ve stepped through a portal into a different dimension. This is not the Lynch family I’ve always known. This is not the life I’ve known for the last five years.

Reed told me he loved me.

Sabrina is in love with Lydia.

Madison is trying to hook Reed up with his ex.

And Chase is pressed against my side at the breakfast table, his arm slung over the back of the chair, oblivious to my distress.

Reed said he loves me. That he’s in love with me . How am I just supposed to eat some oatmeal and move on with my life? What the hell are we going to do when it’s time to leave? What the hell does any of this mean for our lives?

Reed sits across the table from me. I can tell he’s trying not to meet my eye, but every few minutes, he does anyway, and I have to look away quick because it’s all just too… obvious . If anyone sees our eyes meet, even for a second, I’m certain they’ll know. They’ll know that everything changed between us last night, and that now we can’t go back.

“What are the plans for today?” Madison asks. She’s clearly trying to break the silence because nobody at the table is speaking. Sabrina has been keeping her head low, and I want to tell her that she can enjoy the rest of her vacation. She has to know by now that we would never tell anyone about her and Lydia, but every time her eyes find mine across the table, they’re full of fear. And then she gets Reed in her sights and looks away again. Us and our secrets.

“Jet skis?” Reed says, just as I take a sip from my orange juice.

And then immediately choke on said orange juice. Reed looks over at me, his expression innocent, but I know he remembers asking me about the jet skis when he was fingering me in the hot tub.

Everyone at the table watches me try to catch my breath, and then I say past the constriction of my throat, “Jet skis sound fun.”

Madison smiles. “Great. I’m going to run into town with Lydia to get some last-minute things we need before the caterers show up.”

“Sounds good,” Sabrina immediately pipes in. “Could I come? I need to grab a few things.”

“Sure.” Madison focuses on cutting into her eggs benedict as the table falls quiet again. That one conversation wasn’t enough to undo everything that happened between all of us yesterday.

My eyes meet Reed’s again, and I wonder what happened between him and Amina. Did he sleep on the floor the way he did our first night? Did the two of them share the bed with a pillow wall between them?

Like she knows I’m thinking about her, trying to figure out how much contact she’s had with Reed, trying to put out of my mind how many times they probably slept together if they dated for almost a year, Amina looks at Chase and says, “You know who I ran into last week? Carla Clemons. You remember her, right?”

He pulls a contemplative face. “I’m not sure.”

“You guys met at that New Year’s party in New York, like, four years ago. She talked about it for weeks afterwards. She thought it was so funny that she ran into my boyfriend’s brother at some random party.”

Silence falls on the table again, but this time, it’s stretched tight. My brain begins to run through the facts, all the things that have been laid out before me.

New Year’s four years ago. Less than a week after my mother died. I remember Chase leaving to go to New York. He had said he was going to check in on Madison, to spend time with her after my mother’s funeral was over because he’d been in Minnesota for a week and was worried about her, was feeling overly sentimental, all things considered.

Madison breaks it, clueless about the chaos in my brain. “New Year’s? Chase hasn’t spent a New Year’s in New York in ages.” Her eyes flicker over to us.

Amina’s smile falls, and my stomach tightens. “Oh, right. Sorry. I thought I remembered?—”

“She must have had you confused for someone else.” Reed looks back and forth between the two of us before landing on me. It’s like he can’t help it. He can’t help but lie for his brother, even though his brother is an asshole. Chase doesn’t deserve that kindness.

“Maybe…maybe she was wrong. Maybe she meant someone else. It was a long time ago.” She can tell this news is distressing, even though she doesn’t know why.

Chase leans forward on his elbows. “Yeah, it was definitely someone else.” He glances sideways at me, but I keep my eyes forward, avoiding the eyes of everyone at the table, staring out at the lake over Reed’s shoulder.

It shouldn’t matter that Chase was clearly cheating on me from the very beginning, lying to me, abandoning me for some fake sentimentality when I needed him most. My mother died the day after Christmas. And five days later, Chase was at a New Year’s party in New York, most likely fucking some other woman.

It’s not his complete lack of respect that hurts. It’s not the fact that he so obviously never loved me.

What hurts is how stupid I was. What hurts is how blind I was.

My eyes meet Reed’s across the table.

What hurts is all the years I could have been with someone who loved me. And now it’s ruined because I chose the wrong guy.

“I remember that New Year’s,” Madison says, breaking the uncomfortable silence. “Was that the year we were in Aspen, Sabrina?”

Sabrina chimes in with a confirmation and then goes off on a stilted story about skiing, but I can’t even make out the words. Everything is an uncomfortable droning in my ears. Reed watches me, and I watch him.

When I feel like enough time has passed that it won’t be suspicious, I smile at Madison and say, “I think I’m going to go for a walk, get some sun.”

Madison’s mouth falls open, a crease of concern forming between her eyebrows, but before she can argue with me, I turn for the hallway. I go to the front patio because I don’t have anywhere else to go, and I haven’t even made it to the front steps before the door opens behind me and Chase storms out of the house. He gently shuts the door behind him and spins back to me.

“Quinn, look?—”

“Were you ever not cheating on me?” I’m surprised by how little anger there is in my voice. I don’t have any anger left. I just have exhaustion and surrender and grief.

Chase makes a face, his mouth tightening into a sad line and then pulling into a frown again. “No. I was always cheating.”

“You know, I married you because of that week my mom died. You came to Minnesota with me, and you were there for me, and when I wasn’t sure if marrying you was the right thing to do, I told myself that you were that man, the one who helped me pack up all her stuff and held me while I cried. But it was all a lie. You waited until I could breathe again and then you ran off to New York to go to some party. Did you fuck someone else there?”

He nods, so matter-of-fact. “Yes, I did.”

I scrub my face with my hands, realize when my hands come away wet that I’m crying. “So many fucking wasted years,” I whisper.

Chase steps forward and tries to grab onto my shoulders, but I shove him back. He looks surprised, like I punched him, and that’s exactly what I want to do. “Quinn…”

“How could you let me marry you, Chase?” I’m trying to keep my voice down because I know if we speak too loudly, everyone at the breakfast table will be able to hear us. “You knew you couldn’t be the man I needed you to be, and you still asked me to marry you. You still pretended to be someone I could trust. You still let me give you so many good years.”

He sits on one of the rocking chairs on the porch, his shoulders hunched and his head bowed. He shrugs. “I don’t know, Quinn. I guess maybe I thought that you would be able to fix me. I guess I thought that if I could find the perfect wife and give her the perfect life that I could someday be the perfect husband.”

I don’t have a response to that. I don’t have any space inside my brain for his self-pity, for his regret.

I have too much of my own.

“I’d like you to leave, please.”

He looks at me for a long time, like he thinks I’m going to change my mind, but I need him to not be near me. I need him to go away. I need for this week to be over so that I never have to see him again.

Except, I think as he goes inside, when the week is over, he’s not the only one I’ll never see again.