Page 42 of Parallel

My pulse races. I get the feeling he’s talking about more than just the house. I shouldn’t agree, but with his palm pressed to my skin and the way he is looking at me, I’m unable to do anything else.

20

QUINN

The model home is cute but generic. To listen to Jeff, however, you’d think we were in Versailles. He fell in love the moment we pulled up. And once he saw the huge back yard, he was ready to put a ring on it.

“Think how awesome that yard would be for kids,” he says. “It’ll be just like how we grew up. Room to roam.”

There’s an unhappy little twist in my chest. Nick’s question yesterday comes to my head—do you want this more than a degree? And the answer is still no, I absolutely do not. I’m not even sure I want it without the degree. I don’t want what I grew up with. I want the city. I want to be able to order Thai food at midnight, walk places, be anonymous occasionally.

The agent gives us a tour and then suggests going to his office to look at pricing. Jeff is all in while I stand back. “Can we have a moment?” I ask the agent, who nods while Jeff’s eyes dart impatiently between us.

“I think we need to discuss this,” I say, after the agent walks away.

“It won’t hurt to look at it,” he argues. “We could write a check for the deposit today. We have forty-eight hours to change our minds.”

I feel a tiny spark of anger. Has Jeff always pushed this hard for what he wants? Because I’ve made it pretty clear I’m not interested, and yet here he is using his hackneyed sales techniques on me, his future wife.

But maybe he’s never needed to push this hard, because until now I’ve always just rolled over when he wanted something I did not. I’m not sure why it’s taken me this long to see it.

“I’ve actually been thinking about going back to Georgetown,” I venture quietly. My hands begin to sweat as I say these words aloud to him, far more directly than I have in years.

His face goes blank, uncomprehending. “As a student?”

I look up, rubbing my palms over my shorts. “Yes. I want to finish my degree.”

“Quinn…Jesus. Are you serious? You…can’t. Do you have any idea how much that will cost?”

Is he really asking me this, like I’m some naïve little girl who has no idea how much tuition would be? I’m the one who went there for Christ’s sake. “Of course I do. But I’ve got that money from my dad, and I think that’s how he’d have wanted me to use it.”

“On some overpriced degree you’re never going to use? Are you kidding me?” Jeff asks, rolling his eyes. “He’d roll over in his grave.”

My jaw drops. “Are you actually trying to say you know better than I do what my father would have wanted for me?”

He digs his hands in his hair, then pulls me around the corner, away from the raised eyebrows of other people touring the model. “I don’t understand what’s going on. We’ve been talking about buying a house for years, and now, when we’re finally about to pull the trigger, you think you want to go to school? I mean, is the brain tumor…I don’t know, influencing you? Because it’s coming out of nowhere.”

Blood pounds in my ears so loud I can barely think. I can’t believe he’s trying to blame the brain tumor. I’ve been talking about school on and off since we first got together, and he just conveniently managed not to hear me. But before I can levy the accusation, he sinks into the stupid wing chair some designer has placed in the model home’s mudroom and buries his head in his hands. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry. I’m just under a lot of stress at work right now, so your timing isn’t great.”

I feel sympathy welling, and I resent it. I don’t want to feel sympathy for him right now—it’s an emotion that always ends with me giving something up. “What’s going on at work?”

“They’re laying people off. Our profits tanked last year and haven’t come back…rumor is that they’ll have cut forty percent of the sales force by the end of the year.”

Forty percent? My eyes squeeze shut. I’m going to have to pay the mortgage alone again. And why the hell are we looking at houses if that’s the case? “What will you do if that happens?” I realize, too late, that I didn’t ask what we would do. Fortunately, he doesn’t notice.

He stares at the ground, unable to meet my eye. “I have no idea. I can’t go back to the farm.”

Though I never, ever, wanted to live on his parents’ farm, his words shock me a little. He loved that life and only gave it up to follow me here. I suppose I’d begun to think that maybe, if we didn’t work out, if my doubts got the better of me, he would at least have that to fall back on.

“Why couldn’t you go back to the farm?”

He doesn’t look at me, and he doesn’t respond.

Fear makes my voice sharpen. “Jeff, what happened to your share of the farm?”

“I sold it,” he says. “That first job I took down here, when I followed you? It was a total pyramid scheme. I had no idea until it was too late. I was so desperate to make you happy, to impress you, that I just didn’t see the signs, and I wound up so far in debt that I thought I’d never get out from under it. So I sold my share of the farm to my brother. I already knew for a fact you weren’t ever going to want to live there, so it seemed like the best solution.”

Shock knocks me backward. My mouth opens and for a moment no words emerge. The man in front of me is suddenly a stranger. How could he have gotten into that much debt and never mentioned it? “Why am I just learning this now?” I finally ask. I sound winded and I feel it too.