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And I immediately regretted bringing up Shayne.
Shayne and Quinn had kept their breakup fairly tight-lipped.
However, none of us were stupid.
It was quite obvious what had happened.
Quinn had fallen in love. He’d asked Shayne to leave her brother and the gang he ran behind, and she’d refused. Leaving them at a stalemate.
Quinn couldn’t be with someone who had clear ties to a faction that killed people every single day in Dallas and all the surrounding areas. And Shayne couldn’t leave her one and only family member behind—her brother, Costas.
So, even though they were both so fuckin’ in love with each other it hurt, they’d broken up. Then they’d both been miserable for the last ten years. Neither dated—or if they did, they didn’t share the fact with anyone—and both looked completely miserable when the other was mentioned.
And, God forbid, they actually see each other on the rare occasions they were actually in town together.
There was one time, at my birthday party a couple years ago, that I distinctly remembered the two of them seeing each other for the first time in a while.
Quinn had been fresh out of a fight with someone who’d decided they’d rather be free than go to jail. He’d had to fight some six-foot-six jacked dude who was high on lord knew what, and had come out with a broken jaw.
Quinn, sipping whiskey through a straw, had seen her and had immediately shut down.
Meanwhile, the look on Shayne’s face when she saw him there, hurt and in pain, had literally broken my heart. I could see it on her face, her desire to go to him. To wrap him up in her arms and make sure that he was okay and would stay that way forever.
But neither one of them had made a move.
And the rest of the night I’d had to deal with two very unhappy people who were so fucking stubborn that it hurt.
“Come get me on the way to the funeral home. I’ll get dressed here,” I ordered.
He looked at the house with a nauseated look on his face. “I’ll be here.”
Then I was shoving out of his car and heading to my sister’s front door.
The last time I was here, it was when Addison was shipping out to Germany.
I still remembered how excited she’d been because she could finally experience snow.
When I reminded her she could do that in the States, she’d playfully punched me in the arm and said, “Oh, Ande Wande. But I wouldn’t experience snow out of the country. I hear they have castles and history… I can’t wait to explore it all.”
Blowing out a breath to keep the tears at bay—I’d managed not to cry yet that day—I used the key on my keyring to open her door.
And was stopped by the massive pile of boxes my parents had brought home from Germany.
With a heavy heart, I carried all of the boxes into the kitchen, and only once they were all there did I start going through them.
Seemed like as good of a place as any, right?
I spent the next thirty minutes going through her clothes, toiletries, and common everyday things.
I’d just gotten to her stack of books—God, could Addison go through some books—when my phone rang.
I picked it up on the fourth ring.
“Hey,” I said. “You made it?”
“I made it,” Keene confirmed. “Just in time to make it to the hearing, too. My lawyer’s a shark. He’s mad as hell right now. Sometime between when Winston contacted him, and I got here, Folsom literally sent him everything that she could find on my mother. There are years and years of recorded drug abuse, checks from my father to help support that drug abuse, and tons of emails sent between her and my father pretty much listing everything she demanded for him to be able to ‘keep me.’ Pretty much, how the emails look, my dad had to pay her once every few months in order to keep me around. Though it would be sweet to know that he actually wanted me, he stated in a few emails how I always was really charismatic and knew how to attract a crowd. Which makes me fucking sick.”
My heart sank.
