Sarah let it slide. “Why’d you break up with her?”
“Because . . . ” He wasn’t sure of the answer himself. “I don’t know. I’ve been sick a lot. But before this, I never really expected to die at thirty. I thought I’d finish school and have kids. I thought I’d change the world with the research foundation we started. And I thought that when I died, I’d be with somebody I was in love with.”
Sarah’s hand halted on his arm. “What about Erin?”
He was able to stop himself from saying, “What about Erin?” He’d made enough mistakes today. He said truthfully, “When Erin and I are together, we don’t get along. We argue.”
“Do you love her?”
He wished Sarah would move her hand on his arm again, but there was no chance of that now. He was damned either way. If he said he didn’t love Erin, Sarah would leave him. She would think she’d gotten too close to him and he had chosen her over Erin, wrecking her plan to keep the band together. If he lied and said he was in love with Erin, that would ruin any slim chance he might have at a real relationship with Sarah later, if he ever figured out how to swing it.
He said carefully, and again truthfully, “Yes, I love her.” Just not the way you mean.
Sarah sat up suddenly. The cable pulled out of the monitor, and the alarm sounded.
“I’ve got it,” Quentin called over the beeping so that ten nurses wouldn’t rush in. He rolled off the bed and bent to plug the cord back in.
“So, Martin used to work here, too?” Sarah asked conversationally, poker-faced.
“Yeah. Martin was a terrific nurse. The job kept him sober, because the hospital makes employees take drug tests. And Erin worked here as an ultrasound tech. We never were sure what Owen did. He has an MBA, and he worked up in accounting.”
“Owen has an MBA?”
“Pretty good for a dumbass.” Quentin grinned.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“Helped out.” Quentin cupped his hands and called, “King to queen seven,” to a passing paramedic.
“Shit,” the paramedic exclaimed without stopping.
Quentin glanced up at the almost empty IV bag, then at his watch. “We can still finish your album by the deadline tonight. But we won’t finish it before your courier’s flight back.”
“I’ll take it to New York myself tomorrow morning,” she said.
Quentin’s heart skipped a beat. “Are you coming back down after that?”
“Of course,” she said. “I’ll just go up for the day. We still need to get you and Erin together. And I have to keep you out of trouble until the Nationally Televised Holiday Concert Event.”
“I’ll go with you to New York,” he said suddenly.
Her eyes brightened, then darkened. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“We don’t know whether Nine Lives is on the loose. It’s bad to have the thing I have, the disabled—What did you call it?”
“Disabling codependence?”
“Yeah. It’s bad to have that. But it’s okay to ask for help.”
She half smiled. “I don’t want you to bite the head off a dove in the record company office.”
“I’ll behave,” he promised.
“That’s not the only thing I want to do while I’m in town. I need to visit Wendy’s baby. This may be all the baby I ever get.”
“Oh, honey,” he said, taking her hand. “You should have told me it meant that much to you. We could have finished the album days ago, and you could have been there when the baby was born.”
He really was idiot Quentin. He didn’t realize what he’d admitted until her poker face began to fissure. She seethed, “You mean to tell me that all this time, you’ve been holding back, delaying the album on purpose—”
He clapped his hands. “Okay, let’s get you out of here. We have an album to record.” He caught a passing nurse and gestured to the IV. “Has she had enough of this? I’m taking her home.”
Quentin hadn’t expected what was left of the Birmingham paparazzi to be waiting on the sidewalk outside the emergency room, plus ten extra reporters and photographers in town early for the Nationally Televised Holiday Concert Event. But come to think of it, an ambulance pulling up to his house three days before the concert was a scoop.
He pushed through the photographers like a bodyguard to clear a path for Sarah, but Sarah stopped and gave a statement to the reporters. With a feeling of foreboding, he listened to her tell the truth. When they finally reached his big-ass truck, he told her reprovingly that she should be careful what she told the press, because it might come back to sting her.
“How can it possibly matter to anyone that I’m allergic to bee stings?” she asked.
“You’re going to be sorry,” he said as he drove back to the house.
He tucked her into his bed and went downstairs to the recording session made frantic by his bandmates’ fears that they might miss the deadline. Several times he went upstairs to check on Sarah and found her sound asleep in the quiet room.
But at about eight in the evening, she stumbled down the stairs to the studio. It was a far cry from the first day he’d known her. Barefoot, she wore his boxers and T-shirt. She’d knotted them to take up some slack, but they still hung off her. A blanket was hunched around her, and her tousled hair fell in stripes to frame her ashen face. Wandering behind the technicians and stepping around the Timberlanes, to whom she didn’t give a glance, she lay across the empty chairs at the back of the control room and curled into a ball. He had thought he’d never see it, but here it was: Sarah undone.
Erin nodded in Sarah’s direction, as if Quentin needed prompting. He set his bass in its stand and walked out of the sound booth. Kneeling in front of Sarah, he pushed a pink strand away from her furrowed brow. “What can I get you?”
She opened her eyes and closed them again. “Nothing, thank you,” she murmured. “Couldn’t sleep.”
“You’re sure as hell not going to get any sleep down here.”
“I wanted to be with you.”
He wished this were true. You mean you wanted to make sure we got your album done, he thought, but he didn’t have the heart to argue with her. He smoothed her hair again, squeezed her shoulder, kissed her forehead, and went back into the sound booth.
He switched off the sound to the control room and turned his back on the spectators. He wouldn’t put it past Sarah to be able to read lips. “Sarah’s taking the master copy to New York herself tomorrow,” he told the band, “and I’m going with her.”