Fic: Last Call (1/1)
Title: Last Call
Author: cranberry_pi
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Through "Journey", but it's pretty AU.
Warnings: Death of a child, possible suicide
Summary: Future!Fic. An attempt at this prompt: "based on this sixmillionsecrets-secret: I was so mean to you in high school. I called you names, and insulted you. But when I wanted to swallow 200 pills last night, you were the one who stayed up with me on the phone until 5 am to make sure I stayed alive. I cannot thank you enough, and I swear to God I'll make this up to you. Quinn is suicidal and Rachel helps her!"
A/N: I probably greatly exaggerated how long it would take a fistful of sleeping pills to work, but call it dramatic necessity, and let's leave it at that.
When the phone rang shortly after midnight, I assumed it was either my agent or my personal assistant. They’d be the only people brave or foolhardy enough to call me that late - everyone knew that Rachel Berry needed her beauty sleep, and that she didn’t like being bothered after ten. I may have been a star, but I avoided the party-all-night clichés - I’d spent too many years working far too hard to throw it all away and end up in rehab or something. So, when I answered, I may have been overly grumpy.
“Someone better be dead,” I rasped, and there was a soft gasp on the other end of the line. And then just breathing. “Hello?” I tried again. “Who is this?” There was no answer, and I sighed. “I see my phone number’s on the internet again. I’m hanging up now.”
“Wait,” a feminine voice interrupted. “P-Please, don’t hang up.”
“Who is this?”
“Quinn,” the voice was choked with tears, and I barely made out her answer.
“Quinn? I’m sorry, I don’t know a - wait. Quinn Fabray?”
“Yeah,” she confirmed softly.
Quinn Fabray. The girl - well, woman now - who’d made my high school life hell. I could still remember every slushie, every cruel nickname, every minute that she’d spent tormenting me. Sometimes in my dreams, she was the faceless terror that chased me down dark hallways, taunting me with shouts of “RuPaul,” or “Manhands,” or my particular favourite, “Treasure Trail.” It was the sort of teasing that stuck with you forever, and in my darkest moments her voice was the one in my head that told me I was untalented, ugly, fat, a failure - just like she had back then. This was the first time I’d heard her voice outside of my own head since senior year of high school - she’d gotten herself pregnant by one of the players on the football team and transferred to a different school that would allow her time to raise her baby. I was at a complete loss as to why she’d have called me, and I only stayed on the line out of curiosity.
“What do you want, Quinn?” my tone was harsh and dismissive, but I think that could be forgiven considering our shared history.
“I - I’m sorry to bother you, Rachel. I just - I got your number from Finn. I won’t ever bother you again, I promise - I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am.”
“For what, Quinn?”
“For everything. For everything I ever did, everything I ever said. You were an amazing person, and you didn’t deserve it. I had reasons for the way I acted, but none of them make it forgivable. I - I just wanted to say I’m sorry while I still could.”
Behind the tears in her voice, it was strangely toneless. Her choice of phrase seemed to ring with a disturbing finality. “Quinn - I appreciate the sentiment. It’s a few years late, but I do appreciate it. What do you mean, though, while you still can? What’s going on?”
“It doesn’t matter. I just - thank you, Rachel. Thanks for the chance to say sorry. I won’t keep you up anymore.” Her voice grew softer as, I presumed, she began to hang up.
“Quinn, wait!” I shouted, grateful that my penthouse apartment was totally soundproofed. She didn’t answer, but there was no click as the line disconnected either. “Quinn, please talk to me - what’s going on? Is there something wrong?”
“Everything is wrong, Rachel. My whole life. But soon it’s not going to matter. Look, I’m really sorry to have called you. Just - don’t worry about it, okay?”
The longer we talked, the more my suspicion that something terrible was on the precipice of occurring grew - the fear ballooning in my stomach and settling there like a ball of hot lead. “Quinn,” I asked softly, trying to keep my tone as neutral as possible, “are you planning to do something? Are you - was this call an attempt to make things right with me before you killed yourself?”
She was crying - I could hear her - but she didn’t answer, so I pushed on. “If that’s what this was, Quinn, I can’t in good conscience let you off the line.” I was sitting bolt upright in bed now, and I palmed the bedside lamp on. “Listen to me - I don’t know anything about your life, Quinn, but I know that whatever you’re planning, it can’t be the answer. There are people who care about you.”
She snorted. “If that’s what you think, then you really don’t know about my life. Goodbye, Rachel.”
“Quinn Fabray, don’t you fucking dare hang up on me!” I screamed. I don’t know where this protective mama-bear instinct was coming from, but I was invested in this now. If I was the last call she was going to make, then she was my responsibility.
“I’ve never heard you swear before, Berry,” she sniffled. It wasn’t much of a response, but she was still on the line, so it was a small victory.
“Quinn, think of your daughter - you can’t-” a harsh sob interrupted me.
“My daughter’s dead, Rachel. SIDS - she didn’t live to see her first birthday.”
“Oh, god - oh, Quinn, I’m so sorry.”
“Why?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Why are you sorry? You have no reason to be sorry for me - you should be doing cartwheels that my life is miserable - it’s the least that I deserve for the way I’ve behaved. I thought you of all people would agree with that.”
“I would never be happy that someone lost their child - no one deserves that sort of pain. Whatever may have happened between us, I would never have wished that on you. What about Noah?”
“You know, even I never called him that - he was always just Puck. What about him?”
“Well, surely he’d be devastated to lose you.”
“Puck left me after Beth died. You’re batting zero here, Berry - I’m sorry, I mean Rachel. Are you starting to get it now?”
“Your family?”
Her cry was almost keening, and my heart broke a little to hear it. “Never took me back after I decided to keep Beth. I have nothing, Rachel - nothing. I went from being on the fast track out of this shithole town with an athletic scholarship to being just another unwed mother, to being alone.”
I’d honestly never thought about what she might be doing. She was my tormentor, my nemesis, and I’d always assumed that she’d gone somewhere with a nice scholarship, that she’d married Noah Puckerman and settled down in a house with a white picket fence. It had never crossed my mind that she might be as miserable as she had made me back then. I was almost ashamed of all the hateful thoughts and words I’d directed at her in the years between then and now - yes, I’d wished ill of her, but certainly nothing like this.
“Quinn,” I argued, “you must have people in your life, friends,” she scoffed.
“Do you want me to tell you about my life, Rachel? I work twelve hour shifts at the rendering plant, being hit on by Karofsky the entire time. I finish my shift, I drive to Akron, I go to the lesbian bar there. I get shitfaced, I pick up a girl, I fuck her, then I drive home. The next day, I do it all over again. I live in a trailer that hasn’t been cleaned since - well, for a long time. That’s my life. Does it sound like it’s worth saving?”
“Every life is worth saving, Quinn - wait, did you say-”
“That I’m gay? I sure did. You know why I treated you the way I did, Rachel? Fuck it, if this is my last night, let’s get it all out there. I wanted you. I wanted you so bad that my stomach was tied in knots, so bad that I stayed up at night crying because I could never tell you. I could never say that I wanted to run my hands through your hair, that you had the best pair of legs in the entire school, that when I touched myself I thought of you, that I dreamt of you and I in some fantasy future with kids and a dog. Every girl I’ve ever fucked, every single one, you’re the face that I see when I come.”
I was speechless. One would have thought, growing up with two gay dads and being exposed to queer theory from a young age, that it should have been obvious to me. And in retrospect, of course it was. All of the things she’d done were born out a fear or inability to come out of the closet, and the self-loathing that accompanied it. It was a staggering revelation, but I needed to keep her talking, so I couldn’t contemplate it for long.
“I’m sorry,” I knew I was repeating myself, but I couldn’t help it - there aren’t enough words in the English language to express regret, I don’t think. “I’m so, so sorry that you had to go through that. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for you, and I’m sorry that I couldn’t have helped you back then, made it easier. I’m a lesbian myself, and-“
“I know. You’re famous, Rachel. I know a lot about you. But it’s not your fault - the only person who could have helped me back then was me, and I was too stupid. Too ready to hide behind religion and popularity and small-town thinking to have ever imagined coming out. So instead I made you miserable the way that pining for you made me feel miserable, and it was so unfair. So mean, and so unfair, and life ended up giving me exactly what I deserved for it.”
I tried to derail her. “What kind of dog?”
“What?”
“You said you pictured us with kids and a dog. What kind of dog?”
“Oh - a bulldog. His name was Winston.”
“That’s very clever - I like bulldogs, they’re cute. What about the kids? What were their names? How many would we have?”
“Three,” there were still tears in her voice, but she sounded wistful and dreamy now. “Two girls, Nancy and Philippa. And a little boy named Thomas. He’d be a troublemaker, but growing up with two sisters would,” she dissolved into soft crying, heartbreaking to listen to. I’d have given anything in that moment to reach out and hold her, but all I could do was make comforting noises and be grateful that she was still clutching the phone to her ear.
“You know,” I said softly when the worst of her tears had ceased; “it’s not too late for you to have that kind of life, Quinn. You’re only - what, twenty-four? You’re-”
“Don’t patronise me,” she said angrily. “How am I going to have that life, Rachel? I’m a drunk who let her baby girl die, I have no high school diploma, no future. And sure as hell no one to love me that much. This isn’t some fantasy world where I can just get swept off my feet into a good life. I’m going to be living here in this town until I die - a Lima loser until the end. So why not speed the process up a little? I don’t feel like spending the next fifty or sixty years being miserable. Look - thank you for this. I’m grateful that I got to tell you all this. But I’m ready to go now. Whatever’s waiting, I feel a little better about it.”
“Quinn, don’t, please. You can’t just tell me that you loved me and then end your life. That’s not fair.”
“Fair?” she shouted, and I pumped a triumphant fist. Anger was better than the defeated attitude she’d adopted, and I was thrilled to hear it in her voice - it was a step away from the metaphorical ledge, at least. “What the fuck does fair have to do with anything? I gave my heart and my soul to my child, and she died! How is that fair? My family, the people who were supposed to love and support me forever, they turned their fucking backs on me! How is that fair? There is no fair in this life. If there was, we’d be growing old together, and that’s never going to happen.”
“What if it could?” the question even surprised me, seeming to jump from my lips unbidden.
Quinn sighed. “Don’t tease me, Rachel, and don’t think that I’m stupid. That ship left the dock almost ten years ago, and it’s not ever coming back. I kind of hope that’s what heaven is, though, if they’ll let me in. A chance to have what I missed out on. If it is, I - I really hope I’ll see you there someday.”
“Quinn, please - it’s not too late for you to-”
“Well, that’s where you’re wrong, Rachel. I took a bunch of sleeping pills with some vodka before I phoned you. It really shouldn’t be long now, the world’s gettin’ a little fuzzy ‘round the edges. I didn’t think this call would take this long.”
My heart dropped into my stomach. “Tell me you’re joking, Quinn, tell me you haven’t.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and I hoped it was my imagination that made her voice seem quiet, tired. “I’m so sorry, Rach. I love you, and I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me someday. I - I wish I could have been in love with you, been yours, even for a day. Goodbye.”
“Quinn, please don’t-” the call ended with a click that sounded loud as a gunshot. I picked the phone right back up and dialled 911.
“911, what is your emergency?”
“I need you to listen to me,” I said, as calmly and clearly as I could. “I need you to contact the emergency services in Lima, Ohio. There’s a woman there, named Quinn Fabray, who’s attempted suicide with pills. They need to get to her quickly.”
I heard the operator typing. “How do you spell her last name, ma’am?”
“F-a-b-r-a-y.”
“Do you have an address?”
“No - she lives in a trailer, so maybe the trailer park? I only remember there being one there.”
“How do you know that Miss Fabray is attempting suicide?”
“She was on the phone with me.”
“I see. You said she took pills?”
“Sleeping pills, she said, with alcohol.”
“I understand, ma’am. Lima emergency services are en route now. Does Miss Fabray have any family that should be notified?”
“No - her parents shouldn’t be contacted under any circumstances. If there’s any news of her condition, please call my cell.” I rattled off the number.
“Thank you, ma’am. Have a good night.”
The minute the call ended, I dialled my assistant, ignoring his protestations about the time. “Jack? Rachel. I need you to cancel anything I had going for the rest of the week and get me a first-class ticket on the first flight from here to Lima Ohio. I’ll be at JFK in an hour.” I hung up and began to throw an outfit together. I didn’t know what awaited me in Lima - I didn’t even know if Quinn would pull through, as horrific a thought as that was - but I didn’t want her to wake up alone. Maybe there’d never be a future where the two of us had kids and a dog named Winston - but maybe there could be. And I’d never know if I didn’t take the chance.
Author: cranberry_pi
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Through "Journey", but it's pretty AU.
Warnings: Death of a child, possible suicide
Summary: Future!Fic. An attempt at this prompt: "based on this sixmillionsecrets-secret: I was so mean to you in high school. I called you names, and insulted you. But when I wanted to swallow 200 pills last night, you were the one who stayed up with me on the phone until 5 am to make sure I stayed alive. I cannot thank you enough, and I swear to God I'll make this up to you. Quinn is suicidal and Rachel helps her!"
A/N: I probably greatly exaggerated how long it would take a fistful of sleeping pills to work, but call it dramatic necessity, and let's leave it at that.
When the phone rang shortly after midnight, I assumed it was either my agent or my personal assistant. They’d be the only people brave or foolhardy enough to call me that late - everyone knew that Rachel Berry needed her beauty sleep, and that she didn’t like being bothered after ten. I may have been a star, but I avoided the party-all-night clichés - I’d spent too many years working far too hard to throw it all away and end up in rehab or something. So, when I answered, I may have been overly grumpy.
“Someone better be dead,” I rasped, and there was a soft gasp on the other end of the line. And then just breathing. “Hello?” I tried again. “Who is this?” There was no answer, and I sighed. “I see my phone number’s on the internet again. I’m hanging up now.”
“Wait,” a feminine voice interrupted. “P-Please, don’t hang up.”
“Who is this?”
“Quinn,” the voice was choked with tears, and I barely made out her answer.
“Quinn? I’m sorry, I don’t know a - wait. Quinn Fabray?”
“Yeah,” she confirmed softly.
Quinn Fabray. The girl - well, woman now - who’d made my high school life hell. I could still remember every slushie, every cruel nickname, every minute that she’d spent tormenting me. Sometimes in my dreams, she was the faceless terror that chased me down dark hallways, taunting me with shouts of “RuPaul,” or “Manhands,” or my particular favourite, “Treasure Trail.” It was the sort of teasing that stuck with you forever, and in my darkest moments her voice was the one in my head that told me I was untalented, ugly, fat, a failure - just like she had back then. This was the first time I’d heard her voice outside of my own head since senior year of high school - she’d gotten herself pregnant by one of the players on the football team and transferred to a different school that would allow her time to raise her baby. I was at a complete loss as to why she’d have called me, and I only stayed on the line out of curiosity.
“What do you want, Quinn?” my tone was harsh and dismissive, but I think that could be forgiven considering our shared history.
“I - I’m sorry to bother you, Rachel. I just - I got your number from Finn. I won’t ever bother you again, I promise - I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am.”
“For what, Quinn?”
“For everything. For everything I ever did, everything I ever said. You were an amazing person, and you didn’t deserve it. I had reasons for the way I acted, but none of them make it forgivable. I - I just wanted to say I’m sorry while I still could.”
Behind the tears in her voice, it was strangely toneless. Her choice of phrase seemed to ring with a disturbing finality. “Quinn - I appreciate the sentiment. It’s a few years late, but I do appreciate it. What do you mean, though, while you still can? What’s going on?”
“It doesn’t matter. I just - thank you, Rachel. Thanks for the chance to say sorry. I won’t keep you up anymore.” Her voice grew softer as, I presumed, she began to hang up.
“Quinn, wait!” I shouted, grateful that my penthouse apartment was totally soundproofed. She didn’t answer, but there was no click as the line disconnected either. “Quinn, please talk to me - what’s going on? Is there something wrong?”
“Everything is wrong, Rachel. My whole life. But soon it’s not going to matter. Look, I’m really sorry to have called you. Just - don’t worry about it, okay?”
The longer we talked, the more my suspicion that something terrible was on the precipice of occurring grew - the fear ballooning in my stomach and settling there like a ball of hot lead. “Quinn,” I asked softly, trying to keep my tone as neutral as possible, “are you planning to do something? Are you - was this call an attempt to make things right with me before you killed yourself?”
She was crying - I could hear her - but she didn’t answer, so I pushed on. “If that’s what this was, Quinn, I can’t in good conscience let you off the line.” I was sitting bolt upright in bed now, and I palmed the bedside lamp on. “Listen to me - I don’t know anything about your life, Quinn, but I know that whatever you’re planning, it can’t be the answer. There are people who care about you.”
She snorted. “If that’s what you think, then you really don’t know about my life. Goodbye, Rachel.”
“Quinn Fabray, don’t you fucking dare hang up on me!” I screamed. I don’t know where this protective mama-bear instinct was coming from, but I was invested in this now. If I was the last call she was going to make, then she was my responsibility.
“I’ve never heard you swear before, Berry,” she sniffled. It wasn’t much of a response, but she was still on the line, so it was a small victory.
“Quinn, think of your daughter - you can’t-” a harsh sob interrupted me.
“My daughter’s dead, Rachel. SIDS - she didn’t live to see her first birthday.”
“Oh, god - oh, Quinn, I’m so sorry.”
“Why?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Why are you sorry? You have no reason to be sorry for me - you should be doing cartwheels that my life is miserable - it’s the least that I deserve for the way I’ve behaved. I thought you of all people would agree with that.”
“I would never be happy that someone lost their child - no one deserves that sort of pain. Whatever may have happened between us, I would never have wished that on you. What about Noah?”
“You know, even I never called him that - he was always just Puck. What about him?”
“Well, surely he’d be devastated to lose you.”
“Puck left me after Beth died. You’re batting zero here, Berry - I’m sorry, I mean Rachel. Are you starting to get it now?”
“Your family?”
Her cry was almost keening, and my heart broke a little to hear it. “Never took me back after I decided to keep Beth. I have nothing, Rachel - nothing. I went from being on the fast track out of this shithole town with an athletic scholarship to being just another unwed mother, to being alone.”
I’d honestly never thought about what she might be doing. She was my tormentor, my nemesis, and I’d always assumed that she’d gone somewhere with a nice scholarship, that she’d married Noah Puckerman and settled down in a house with a white picket fence. It had never crossed my mind that she might be as miserable as she had made me back then. I was almost ashamed of all the hateful thoughts and words I’d directed at her in the years between then and now - yes, I’d wished ill of her, but certainly nothing like this.
“Quinn,” I argued, “you must have people in your life, friends,” she scoffed.
“Do you want me to tell you about my life, Rachel? I work twelve hour shifts at the rendering plant, being hit on by Karofsky the entire time. I finish my shift, I drive to Akron, I go to the lesbian bar there. I get shitfaced, I pick up a girl, I fuck her, then I drive home. The next day, I do it all over again. I live in a trailer that hasn’t been cleaned since - well, for a long time. That’s my life. Does it sound like it’s worth saving?”
“Every life is worth saving, Quinn - wait, did you say-”
“That I’m gay? I sure did. You know why I treated you the way I did, Rachel? Fuck it, if this is my last night, let’s get it all out there. I wanted you. I wanted you so bad that my stomach was tied in knots, so bad that I stayed up at night crying because I could never tell you. I could never say that I wanted to run my hands through your hair, that you had the best pair of legs in the entire school, that when I touched myself I thought of you, that I dreamt of you and I in some fantasy future with kids and a dog. Every girl I’ve ever fucked, every single one, you’re the face that I see when I come.”
I was speechless. One would have thought, growing up with two gay dads and being exposed to queer theory from a young age, that it should have been obvious to me. And in retrospect, of course it was. All of the things she’d done were born out a fear or inability to come out of the closet, and the self-loathing that accompanied it. It was a staggering revelation, but I needed to keep her talking, so I couldn’t contemplate it for long.
“I’m sorry,” I knew I was repeating myself, but I couldn’t help it - there aren’t enough words in the English language to express regret, I don’t think. “I’m so, so sorry that you had to go through that. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for you, and I’m sorry that I couldn’t have helped you back then, made it easier. I’m a lesbian myself, and-“
“I know. You’re famous, Rachel. I know a lot about you. But it’s not your fault - the only person who could have helped me back then was me, and I was too stupid. Too ready to hide behind religion and popularity and small-town thinking to have ever imagined coming out. So instead I made you miserable the way that pining for you made me feel miserable, and it was so unfair. So mean, and so unfair, and life ended up giving me exactly what I deserved for it.”
I tried to derail her. “What kind of dog?”
“What?”
“You said you pictured us with kids and a dog. What kind of dog?”
“Oh - a bulldog. His name was Winston.”
“That’s very clever - I like bulldogs, they’re cute. What about the kids? What were their names? How many would we have?”
“Three,” there were still tears in her voice, but she sounded wistful and dreamy now. “Two girls, Nancy and Philippa. And a little boy named Thomas. He’d be a troublemaker, but growing up with two sisters would,” she dissolved into soft crying, heartbreaking to listen to. I’d have given anything in that moment to reach out and hold her, but all I could do was make comforting noises and be grateful that she was still clutching the phone to her ear.
“You know,” I said softly when the worst of her tears had ceased; “it’s not too late for you to have that kind of life, Quinn. You’re only - what, twenty-four? You’re-”
“Don’t patronise me,” she said angrily. “How am I going to have that life, Rachel? I’m a drunk who let her baby girl die, I have no high school diploma, no future. And sure as hell no one to love me that much. This isn’t some fantasy world where I can just get swept off my feet into a good life. I’m going to be living here in this town until I die - a Lima loser until the end. So why not speed the process up a little? I don’t feel like spending the next fifty or sixty years being miserable. Look - thank you for this. I’m grateful that I got to tell you all this. But I’m ready to go now. Whatever’s waiting, I feel a little better about it.”
“Quinn, don’t, please. You can’t just tell me that you loved me and then end your life. That’s not fair.”
“Fair?” she shouted, and I pumped a triumphant fist. Anger was better than the defeated attitude she’d adopted, and I was thrilled to hear it in her voice - it was a step away from the metaphorical ledge, at least. “What the fuck does fair have to do with anything? I gave my heart and my soul to my child, and she died! How is that fair? My family, the people who were supposed to love and support me forever, they turned their fucking backs on me! How is that fair? There is no fair in this life. If there was, we’d be growing old together, and that’s never going to happen.”
“What if it could?” the question even surprised me, seeming to jump from my lips unbidden.
Quinn sighed. “Don’t tease me, Rachel, and don’t think that I’m stupid. That ship left the dock almost ten years ago, and it’s not ever coming back. I kind of hope that’s what heaven is, though, if they’ll let me in. A chance to have what I missed out on. If it is, I - I really hope I’ll see you there someday.”
“Quinn, please - it’s not too late for you to-”
“Well, that’s where you’re wrong, Rachel. I took a bunch of sleeping pills with some vodka before I phoned you. It really shouldn’t be long now, the world’s gettin’ a little fuzzy ‘round the edges. I didn’t think this call would take this long.”
My heart dropped into my stomach. “Tell me you’re joking, Quinn, tell me you haven’t.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and I hoped it was my imagination that made her voice seem quiet, tired. “I’m so sorry, Rach. I love you, and I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me someday. I - I wish I could have been in love with you, been yours, even for a day. Goodbye.”
“Quinn, please don’t-” the call ended with a click that sounded loud as a gunshot. I picked the phone right back up and dialled 911.
“911, what is your emergency?”
“I need you to listen to me,” I said, as calmly and clearly as I could. “I need you to contact the emergency services in Lima, Ohio. There’s a woman there, named Quinn Fabray, who’s attempted suicide with pills. They need to get to her quickly.”
I heard the operator typing. “How do you spell her last name, ma’am?”
“F-a-b-r-a-y.”
“Do you have an address?”
“No - she lives in a trailer, so maybe the trailer park? I only remember there being one there.”
“How do you know that Miss Fabray is attempting suicide?”
“She was on the phone with me.”
“I see. You said she took pills?”
“Sleeping pills, she said, with alcohol.”
“I understand, ma’am. Lima emergency services are en route now. Does Miss Fabray have any family that should be notified?”
“No - her parents shouldn’t be contacted under any circumstances. If there’s any news of her condition, please call my cell.” I rattled off the number.
“Thank you, ma’am. Have a good night.”
The minute the call ended, I dialled my assistant, ignoring his protestations about the time. “Jack? Rachel. I need you to cancel anything I had going for the rest of the week and get me a first-class ticket on the first flight from here to Lima Ohio. I’ll be at JFK in an hour.” I hung up and began to throw an outfit together. I didn’t know what awaited me in Lima - I didn’t even know if Quinn would pull through, as horrific a thought as that was - but I didn’t want her to wake up alone. Maybe there’d never be a future where the two of us had kids and a dog named Winston - but maybe there could be. And I’d never know if I didn’t take the chance.