He kissed her, softly. “You’re already there, Robin,” he said. “You’ve always been there.”
“No. I haven’t.”
“I’ve never cheated on you.”
“All right.”
“I’ve done some shitty things for Shawn, but that Charlie Maxwell thing was by far the worst.”
“It’s bad, Eric.”
“I told you I’d pissed people off,” he said. “Do you still love me?”
“We need to pack up,” she said. “My mom needs to get to her house.” She was well aware that she hadn’t answered the question.
RENEE’S HOME NOlonger looked like a murder house. She’d had a cleaning service come in during the day, and so when they arrived there at 10:00P.M., the place was spotless, everything smelling of pine, the missing Indian rug the only clue that anything bad had ever happened there. There were no reporters outside either. And so, after her mother had gone to bed and she and Eric had set themselves up in the comfortable guest room that had once been her bedroom, it was easy for her to imagine her dad alive, one room over, snoring beside her mom, a book open in front of him.
Robin threw a T-shirt on and got into the double bed next to Eric, who was wearing his boxer briefs, nothing else. “Do you still love me?” he whispered in the dark.
“Yes.”
“I love you too.”
She inhaled the scent of his cologne, her favorite, worn only for her. “Eric?”
“Yeah?”
“What are you going to do when the news comes out?”
“It won’t.”
“Huh?”
“If that story comes out, it’s not just me that goes down. It’s Shawn. It’s the show. And Ginny doesn’t want to lose her job any more than I do.”
Eric snuggled into Robin’s side, his arm against her belly. She closed her eyes and tried to find sleep, because she didn’t want to be awake with Eric. Not anymore. “What about the waitress?” she said finally. “She lost her job.” But Eric didn’t answer. He was already asleep.
Thirty-Three
Summer
SUMMER HAWKINS HADknown about Quentin’s death for twenty-four hours, but she didn’t allow herself to cry about it until after she’d dropped Dean off at the airport. It felt like an indulgence, weeping over a friend, even a best friend (and Quentin had been Summer’s very best friend), with his husband right beside you, unable to cry or even speak.
Summer had been the first person Dean had called, right after he’d heard the news from the Tarry Ridge police. He’d told her before his sister, before his parents. “I am letting you know first,” he had said. “I know you’re hurting as much as me.”
She wasn’t, of course. How could anyone be hurting as much as Dean? But what she felt over Quentin now was nearly as painful—a mix of sorrow and anger and worst of all, guilt. This was what Summer would never tell Dean: as awful as she felt about Quentin’s suicide, it hadn’t surprised her.
Ever since she’d met him, at a friend’s party during their sophomore year of college, Summer had sensed something off in Quentin Garrison, something broken. It may have been what had drawn her to him in the first place, fixer that she was—that faraway look he’d get when he thought no one was watching him, the way he’d deflectpersonal questions with jokes or how sometimes, when he’d had a few drinks, he’d get tears in his eyes...
Most people didn’t see Quentin as troubled, or even unhappy. They thought he was an overachiever and a bit of a grade grubber, his hand constantly in the air during their creative nonfiction class, always asking overly complicated questions. But Summer knew people. She could see them for who they truly were, and there was so much to Quentin. So much he refused to show.
Senior year, he finally told her. The two of them had been sitting on the floor of her tiny studio apartment just before dawn, stoned out of their minds and talking endlessly as they always did, about politics and philosophy and the hidden meanings behind old Talking Heads songs. And then Quentin had gone quiet. “I want to tell you something,” he had said. “It’s hard for me to say.”
Summer had taken an enormous hit off the bong, her mind racing with crazy imaginings—the sort of unrealistic expectations that embarrassed her now, but had seemed entirely possible back then, when she was a self-absorbed, twenty-one-year-old virgin with an all-consuming crush on her gay best friend.Say it, Summer had thought.Say it, and I will run away with you.But what Quentin had said was this: “My mother hates me.”
Quentin hadn’t said any more than that, but he hadn’t needed to. Summer finally had a reason for the sadness that lurked just beneath that cheery surface, ready to pounce and devour. And now that she knew where it came from, she could defeat it. She could put him back together.
Summer had a big, noisy family back in New Rochelle, New York, and she took Quentin there for Thanksgiving and Christmas, convincing them to accept him as one of their own. When she got a job at KAMC immediately after graduation, she dragged Quentinin too as a package deal. And five years ago, she’d done something even better than either of those things. She’d gone onto his Grindr, found Dean Conrad, and sent him the message that had started their relationship. (“9.5” it had said. A slight exaggeration, probably, but screw it. It had worked.)