Warm fingers caressed their way down the side of Quinn’s cheek. Her eyes thrust open. “Mom, what are you doing here? What time is it?”
“Almost nine o’clock.”
She’d slept for several hours, her body finally succumbing to too many nights spent staring at the ceiling, her mind wandering until its battery died and there was nothing left to charge it anymore. Three hours here. Four there. And last night, seven. She felt almost normal again.
Her mother pointed to a chair by the window. “Your father’s here too.”
Quinn glanced to the side, tried to read her father’s face. It was expressionless, petrified, like if he moved even the slightest amount, it might crumble. She folded a pillow in half, propped herself up in front of it. “I’m sorry about your car, Dad.”
“Don’t worry about the car,” her father said. “That’s what car insurance is for. Just tell us what happened.”
The decision of just how much information to divulge was a slippery slope. Too little and they’d seek additional facts somewhere else. Too much, and they wouldn’t care how old she was—she’d be lucky if they ever allowed her to leave the house again.
Why worry them when the truth was open to interpretation?
Quinn folded her hands into her lap. “I didn’t have my glasses, and I must have been driving too slow. I was rear-ended. The car spun around, and I hit the wall.”
Simple and to the point, though not well received. Her mother looked at her father. His eyes were damp, his petrified wall crumbling. They knew a lot more than they led on, or at least they thought they knew, and it didn’t take much for Quinn to realize she’d been outed by a younger, female version of Judas Iscariot.
“Someone ran you off the road, and you didn’t think it warranted a phone call?” her father asked.
“I did call you, Dad. You didn’t pick up. I called Astrid. I’m home now, and I’m fine. Everything is fine.”
“It’s not fine, Quinn,” her father said. “Your sister told me—”
“You know Astrid. She’s exaggerating. She wasn’t there. I was. You have nothing to worry about. Call Kyle Grady if you don’t believe me. He arrived right after I crashed. He’ll say the same thing I’m saying now.”
Her father leaned forward, rested his hands on his knees. “If you’re in trouble, Quinn, we need to know. You can only poke a hornet’s nest for so long before you get stung.”
Someone was about to get stung, all right—and Quinn would be the one doing the stinging.