“Three.” Cliff gazed at her sympathetically. “She told me about the visits. She always came here instead of your condo or work because it was a social setting and she felt she could approach you here. She’d come to get a peek at you whenever she could, born from the desperate curiosity of a woman who had haunting regrets.”
Quinn shook her head, unable to descramble her brain. “I don’t understand.”
“She knew she was terminal,” he said. “She had every intention of telling you all of this herself, but she ran out of time. And what she left behind is important because—”
“Wait.” Quinn closed her eyes, just now realizing what he was telling her.
Carolyn was dead.
Cliff took the cup of water from her before she could drop it. “The funeral was a few days ago,” he said quietly. “We really need to talk, Quinn. In Wildstone. There are things you don’t know that you need to.”
Quinn let out a sound that might have been a mirthless laugh or a half sob, she wasn’t sure. She shook her head for what felt like the hundredth time in the past few minutes, but the cobwebby feeling didn’t clear.
It couldn’t be true, any of it. Harry Potter here was just a stalker, a good one. Or maybe a scammer. She hated to think that the nice woman she’d known could be a part of some kind of con, but she simply couldn’t accept that her parents wouldn’t have told her she’d been adopted. “I don’t want any part of this.” She stood up and a wave of dizziness hit her.
Cliff rose to his feet too and put his hand on her arm to steady her, looking at her with nothing but kindness and concern in his gaze. “Take my wand.”
She focused in on him, expecting to see a lightning-bolt scar on his forehead. “What?”
“My card,” he said, the furrow between his brows deepening with concern. “Take my card. Think about it and give me a call tomorrow so we can talk about the inheritance. We really need to talk about the inheritance, Quinn.” He paused. “Are you going to be all right?”
“Yeah. Sure,” she said and drove to work on autopilot, where she proceeded to spill things, plate the wrong entrées, make silly mistakes like using shallots instead of onions—
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Marcel demanded. “Get out of my kitchen until your head’s screwed on straight!”
For once he was right. Her head was most definitely not screwed on straight.
They adopted you when you were two days old . . .
“Are you even listening to me?” Marcel yelled up at her. Up, because he was five feet two to her five feet seven, something that normally gave her great pleasure. “Du flittchen,” he muttered in disgust beneath his breath and the entire staff froze in the kitchen like deer in the headlights.
Slut.
Quinn set down her knife so she wasn’t tempted to run him through as she turned to him. “Schiebe ex,” she said, which meant “shove it.” It was the best she could do, at least in German. Pushing past him, she walked out of the kitchen.
“Where are you going?” he screamed after her. “You can’t just leave!”
But leaving was exactly what she was doing.
Skye followed her outside. “Quinn? You okay? What’s going on?”
“You’ve got to go back in there before he gets mad at you too,” Quinn said.
Skye shrugged. “He was born mad. Talk to me.”
So Quinn told her what had happened at the coffee shop, and Skye just stared at her. “Shut the front door.”
“I’ve got to go. I need to talk to my parents,” Quinn said.
“Uh, yeah you do.”
From inside they could hear Marcel yelling for Skye, who squeezed Quinn’s hand. “Call me.”
Quinn promised she would and gave her a quick hug. Then she headed toward her car, pulling out her cell phone to call her boss, Chef Wade.
Chef Wade never wasted words. He answered with, “Talk.”
“I need to leave early,” Quinn said. “I’m so sorry for the short notice, but there’s . . . an emergency. Marcel’s here. He’s got things under control.” By being a tyrannical asshole, but that was another story.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, voice softening with concern, as he was a longtime friend of her parents.
“Nothing I can’t handle,” she promised and hoped that was true. She disconnected and drove straight to her parents’ house.
Her mom and dad were in the living room in front of their lit gas fireplace, sharing a drink. Yes, it was 3 P.M. in April in L.A., which meant the air conditioner was on full blast, but her mom liked her alcohol with ambience.
“Darling,” her mom said, smiling as she stood in welcome. “Such a lovely surprise. Where’s Brock?”
“I’m alone.” Quinn didn’t bother to address—for the thousandth time—that she didn’t spend nearly as much time with Brock as they seemed to hope. “I met someone today.”
Her mom looked dismayed. “Other than Brock? But what will people think?”
“Mom . . .” Quinn pressed her fingertips into her eye sockets to ward off an eye twitch. “I keep telling you, Brock and I aren’t together like that anymore.”
“Right now you mean,” she said. “Right?”
A conversation she didn’t have the strength for. “The man I met today had an interesting story to tell me.” Her breath caught. “He said that I’m adopted.”
Twin looks of shock and guilt slid over her parents’ faces like matching masks and reality hit Quinn smack in the face. “Oh my God.” She staggered to the couch opposite them and sank to it, staring at them. “Oh my God, it’s not a story. It’s true.”
At the awkward beat of utter silence, Quinn stood back up and headed straight to the kitchen. She needed alcohol or sugar, stat. Thank Toll House, she found some ready-made cookie dough in the fridge. Her mom didn’t bake. For that matter, neither did Quinn. She loved to cook and she was good at it, but for whatever reason, baking skills eluded her.
She was stuffing spoonfuls of dough into her mouth when her parents—who were apparently not her parents at all—appeared in the doorway. It was the most disorienting thing she’d ever experienced, looking at them and realizing her life was forever changed, that the very foundation of her entire world had crumbled. “It’s day one of my new raw food diet,” she said inanely.
Her parents exchanged a concerned look. “We need to talk,” her dad said solemnly.
Little late for that . . .
“Honey,” her mom said earnestly. Quinn turned to her hopefully.
“If you eat that whole package, it’s the equivalent of forty-eight cookies.”
Quinn blinked. “Are you kidding me?”
Her dad sighed and leaned onto the island between them. He nudged the block of knives out of her reach and said, “We never expected you to find out.”
“Okay,” she said, absorbing that with a nod. “Wow.” She scooped up the last of the dough.
Her mom opened her mouth but nothing came out of it because Quinn jabbed a finger at her. Then she popped the last bite in, chewed, and licked her thumb before taking a deep breath. “Why?” she finally asked, suitably sugared up. “Why didn’t you just tell me? People are adopted all the time. What possible reason could you have for keeping it a secret?”
“Because I wanted you to be mine,” her mom whispered, her eyes soft and, dammit, a little damp.