Page 144 of Never Alone
She nodded. Once.
She crossed the sidewalk to us. She didn't say anything else to me. She put her hand on my arm. Just for a beat. Then she turned to Cole.
"Get in the car, Cole."
"Quinn—"
"Get in the car."
He got in the car.
Quinn took the bag off my shoulder before I'd registered her reaching for it. She put it in the back seat and then held the front passenger door open for me.
"You sit up here. I'll drive us home."
I looked at her.
Her face was the face she'd worn on the gravel. Steady, cousin-shaped, not asking anything of me.
"Okay."
I got in.
She closed the door behind me.
She came around to the driver's side. She got in. She started the engine.
She drove us home.
CHAPTER 27
Cole
Quinn parked at the curb of Sam and Jamie's house.
The drive back from Savannah had taken two hours. Tessa hadn't said much. She had her hands folded in her lap and her face turned to the window, and she hadn't let go of the sweater she'd been wrapping around herself since the terminal. Mine, I'd realized somewhere on the highway. She'd taken it without asking.
Quinn cut the engine. The silence dropped heavily, the kind that came when you'd been moving too long, and your body finally remembered it had been waiting to stop.
"He's here?"
"Yeah." Her hands stayed on the wheel a beat longer than they needed to. "Sam and Jamie kept him."
I let my head fall back against the seat. The first full breath I'd taken since Savannah.
She looked at me in the rearview. Quinn had a way of looking at people. Steady, unhurried. The way someone watches a thing they've decided needs watching.
"Cole. You should be in a hospital."
I shifted in the seat. The ribs answered first. A deep, dull pull that didn't need translating.
"Quinn."
"I'm just saying."
She got out without saying anything else, came around, and opened my door. The pain meds had worn off somewhere outside Pooler, and I was running on the kind of nothing that came after them. She helped me out, let me lean on her for the half-step it took me to find my feet.
Tessa was already on the sidewalk with the bag, not even looking at the house yet.
