The Quinn who awaited Ellie at the edge of the green was not the same one she’d met along the harbor road this morning. And it certainly wasn’t the same one she’d been tiptoeing around for the past few weeks. Even from a distance, Ellie could see it in her posture, a mix of anxiety and concern; she stood slightly apart from the rest of the crowd, glancing at her phone, her whole body practically vibrating with impatience.
The sun was starting to slope toward the tops of the trees on the other side of town, and the band had taken a break, the brassy sound of their instruments replaced by the uneven hum of voices. Ellie had been looking for her mom. Her thoughts were still spinning like tires over the events of the day, and she wanted nothing more than for the two of them to fill a couple of paper plates and collapse onto a picnic blanket, to spend the rest of the evening talking about anything but her father, anything but Graham, just eating and laughing until the sky fell dark and the fireworks took the place of the stars.
But there was Quinn—this oddly unsettling version of Quinn—pacing at the edges of the party, and when her eyes found Ellie’s, she went still.
And just like that, Ellie knew.
“Want to take a walk?” Quinn asked, and Ellie nodded, allowing herself to be steered away from the many people who fanned out in rings around the gazebo, away from the shops and the food and the noise. She felt oddly numb, her thoughts slow and fumbling as she tried to absorb what she knew to be true. She didn’t need to hear Quinn say it; it was there all over her face, her mouth set in a thin line, her eyes full of concern.
To her surprise, they arrived at Sprinkles, having taken the long way around the backs of the shops that bordered the green. Quinn dug a key from the pocket of her shorts and they slipped inside without a word. The shop was officially closed for the day, though for the festivities they’d donated enormous tubs of ice cream, which were lined up along with everything else on the picnic tables outside. But inside, the store was cool and quiet, the sun coming through the windows at a slant, leaving rectangular stamps across the tiled floor. Ellie followed Quinn into the back, where a small table with a few folding chairs was set up in the storage area, surrounded by cardboard boxes like the start of an igloo, all of them filled with ice-cream toppings and various kinds of candy.
They sat down, and Ellie leaned heavily on the table, a wave of exhaustion sweeping over her. “So it’s out there?” she asked. “My name?”
“It is,” Quinn said with a matter-of-fact nod, and Ellie realized how relieved she was to be hearing this news from her friend. Quinn had always been unflinchingly honest; it was one of the things Ellie loved most about her. Even now, when they hadn’t talked for weeks, when Quinn must have a thousand other questions she wanted to ask, a thousand other things she wanted to say, she seemed to instinctively know what part of the equation Ellie would be most worried about, and she was almost businesslike in her assessment of the situation.
“It also mentions your father,” she said, and her eyes filled with understanding, though she couldn’t possibly have understood any of this. When they were kids, Ellie had told Quinn that her parents were divorced, which somehow sounded better than the truth, even if she’d been allowed to tell it. “He’s out of the picture,” she’d explained, parroting back the words she’d overheard her mom say in the coffee shop when asked by one of the women in town. And just like that, he really was out of the picture, at least between Ellie and Quinn.
Ellie never knew whether Quinn’s mother had forbade her highly inquisitive daughter from asking too many questions, or whether Quinn, even when she was little, saw a warning in Ellie’s eyes whenever the subject came up. But either way, they’d spent the past twelve years dancing around the idea of Ellie’s father, and now—when Quinn had every right to be angry or confused about this gaping hole in their friendship, this enormous secret between them—she instead emanated a kind of quiet capability. They’d fought about far less, and Ellie wouldn’t have blamed her for being upset about this. But that was the thing about best friends; all the petty grievances and minor complaints were left behind as soon as something more important came along, and Ellie was grateful for that.
“It’s not as bad as you’re probably thinking,” Quinn was saying. “Really.”
Still, Ellie’s heart had plummeted at the mention of her father. She took a deep breath and tried to steady her trembling hands. She’d known this would happen ever since she saw the first article this morning, ever since last night, when she’d watched Graham draw his fist back, maybe even since the moment he walked up the steps of their porch that first night. But she still didn’t feel quite prepared.
She thought of her father, with his bright polo and even brighter smile, the feel of his hand as he shook hers, and she was suddenly relieved that she’d lost her nerve earlier. It was better this way. After all, he couldn’t be angry with her if he didn’t know her. If everything had gone according to plan this morning—if she’d knocked on his door and he’d let her in, ushered her over to a table where they could sit and talk, the years between them melting away, if she’d walked out of there with not just a check but also a phone number and a memory and a promise of something more to come—then it would have all dissolved now anyway, as flimsy and fragile as a soap bubble. This would have been all it took for everything to fall apart again: the moment when an unidentified girl was, quite suddenly, identified.
Maybe later—today or tomorrow or the next day—he’d study one of the pictures that would no doubt accompany the articles, and something in his mind would click with the faintest recognition. He’d puzzle over her face, the face of the daughter he’d never reached out to, wondering whether it was familiar because she belonged to him, or because of something else. He’d try to catalog all the smiles he’d seen and the hands he’d shaken, flipping through the images to locate the girl with the red hair and freckles who had stared back at him with unspoken urgency at the clambake that day, willing him to make the connection, to figure it out, to open his eyes. But even then, he probably wouldn’t be able to do it.
“I’ve been trying to reach you all day,” Quinn said, leaning over to open one of the boxes that were strewn all around them. She wrinkled her nose at whatever was inside, and moved on to the next one, pulling out a bag of saltwater taffy. “As soon as I saw the news, I wanted to make sure you knew. Where have you been anyway?”
“My phone’s… broken,” Ellie mumbled, accepting a piece of green taffy from Quinn, then twisting it in her hands. “My mom. Is she…?” She wanted to say mad or angry or upset, but she was sure that her mother would be all of those things, and she couldn’t quite bring herself to complete the sentence. Her stomach lurched when she tried to picture it: her mother picking up a newspaper, or opening up her e-mail, or being stopped by someone on the street in town. They might ask about her daughter, or about the man she’d had an affair with, or they might just ask about Graham and the cameras, the biggest scandal this sleepy town had probably ever seen. There were so many things she could be mad about, it was almost hard to focus on just one.