“Wait…wait a minute.” She sounded perplexed, shocked, and tense. Her interruption was followed by a long period of silence. I heard some rustling in the background. If my heart hadn’t already been in my throat, it would have jumped there now.

At last, when she spoke again, her voice was impossibly soft and warm. “Let’s start over. I’m Katherine—please call me Katherine.”

I pressed my lips together because my chin inexplicably wobbled. I had to look at the ceiling of the Escalade to keep from crying, and I didn’t know why I was so close to tears. “Hi, Katherine….” I paused to chase the watery quality from my voice. “I’m Janie. It’s nice to meet you.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Janie.”

I heard a smile in her voice, and maybe also a little waver in her inflection. I wondered briefly if she, too, were fighting tears.

“So…how…?” I gave her some time to collect her thoughts. It also allowed me to take several deep breaths. After a pause, she continued. “So you and…Quinn? How did that happen?”

“I work for him, for his company.”

“Oh?” She sounded a little wary, but her next question was pleasant enough. “What do you do?”

“I’m an accountant, although my background is in architecture. To be more accurate, my degree is in both mathematics and architecture, but I’ve always been an accountant, never an architect. What do you do?” I closed my eyes again, worried that my question might have come out as rude.

“I’m a teacher. I teach high school calculus.” She answered simply, her tone reflecting that no offense had been taken.

“Oh!” I smiled. “I loved my high school calculus teacher. He’s one of the main reasons I started tutoring kids in math and science. He could teach integrals to anyone, at least I always thought so.”

She laughed lightly, a pleasant sound that made my stomach feel warm. “That’s a great skill to have.”

I began to relax into the conversation. We mostly spoke about ourselves, our likes and dislikes, our hobbies and favorite foods. She didn’t knit, but she crocheted. She also knew how to sew and was an avid quilter. I also learned that she was five years away from retirement, but hadn’t decided whether she actually wanted to.

At no point did she ask directly about Quinn nor did she say his name again. However, whenever I mentioned him or Shelly, she’d grow very quiet, almost like she was holding her breath. Then, when I finished, she’d press me for more information on whatever subject I’d just covered.

I knew that Quinn hadn’t spoken with his parents since his brother’s funeral. I also knew that Shelly didn’t speak to her parents either. I’d never pressed either of them for more information. I’d accepted the situation at face value: Quinn’s parents had blamed him for their oldest son’s death. Shelly had stopped speaking with her mother and father. I guessed this was a way to show solidarity with Quinn.

But now, after a half-hour phone call with the woman, I started to think there was more to the story. Either that or this family had been separated by tragedy and the rift had been fostered by lack of communication.

We ended the call with a plan to email about dinner, a dinner that was to take place sometime over the next two weekends, and my promise to call her again within the next several days—just to talk, she’d said. Then, before hanging up, she asked me what my favorite dessert was.

The dessert question threw me off, so I deployed evasive maneuvers, told her it was too hard to choose, but that I’d let her know when we spoke next. That night I spent several hours researching whether or not desserts, or ingredients in desserts, had any hidden symbolism. For example, I didn’t want to tell her that I liked key lime pie if it meant that she’d think I was a tart.

I finally settled on chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, mostly because I missed Quinn and chocolate was a proven, although woefully inadequate, replacement for intimacy.

***

The next morning I awoke to an empty bed and a text from Quinn indicating that he’d gone for a motorcycle ride wearing his helmet. He went on to state that he would meet Shelly and me for our usual breakfast at Giavanni’s around 10:00 a.m. I checked twice for another text message, hoped for a joke or pun. To my dismay, there was nothing new.

Quinn and I would be sharing our big news with Shelly over pancakes.

She told me the first time we met each other that everything was big news over pancakes.

She and I had hit it off immediately. She was markedly weird, prone to intermittent tangents or periods of silence, and didn’t seem to be able to sit still for very long. Her eccentricities never bothered me. I actually found her fascinating. Part of it was because Quinn was completely devoted to her—in fact, I was 99 percent certain that he supported her financially—and the other reason was because she didn’t seem to care about other people’s opinions as they related to who she was or the decisions she made.

Ever.

Not ever.

In fact, I wondered once or twice if she lacked empathy, but dismissed this theory after we spent more time together. Shelly, although detached with most people, cared deeply for Quinn and had several causes she championed, mostly to do with cruelty toward animals.

As I came to know her, I realized she was one of those people who felt more comfortable in nature than she did in society.

I, however, felt equal parts uncomfortable in both places.

Shelly sometimes spent Saturday nights in the loft Quinn had purchased on her behalf and exclusively for her use. This was the same loft where he’d taken me after finding me drugged at Club Outrageous.

Most of her time, however, was spent in a large farmhouse three hours south of Chicago. She had four horses that she boarded for a rescue foundation, three dogs of various breeds and ages, seven cats, and a parrot named Oscar who only said curse words. Apparently, his former owner had a limited vocabulary.

She was also a sculptor, mostly large-scale metalwork, and a car enthusiast.

I’d only been to the farmhouse once, but I was struck by how many vintage cars she owned in various stages of repair. After she fixed them up, she donated them to charities benefiting animal shelters.

As far as I could tell, she had no interest in men—or women for that matter—and didn’t seem to need or seek relationships outside of the weekly check-in and breakfast with her brother. This struck me as unhealthy, but I kept this opinion to myself.

I also wondered—if I had grown up with a sibling who fostered my strangeness rather than challenged it—if Shelly’s existence was a mirror to an alternate dimension version of me.

I’d been forced by necessity to go to college, get a job, interact with society. Shelly had attended the Art Institute of Chicago, but never held a job—not a real one, at least, with a boss who held her accountable for her work.

If all my bills were paid and money wasn’t an issue to my survival, would I lock myself in a farmhouse with Internet connection, or within walking distance of a library, and just gorge on information day in and day out?

I couldn’t answer this hypothetical question, because both answers—yes and no—felt dissonant with who I was and who I wanted to be.

Therefore, I embraced Shelly as a friend and found I didn’t have to try very hard when we were together. She didn’t seem to mind my presence during her Saturday mornings with Quinn—quite the opposite. I’d missed one breakfast because I thought she might want some alone time with her brother. She made Quinn call me, and refused to eat until I showed up.

Honestly, it was kind of nice to be the least eccentric woman at a meal.

On this particular morning, I was the second one to arrive at Giavanni’s. Shelly was already there and was building a tower of Styrofoam cups at the counter—but not in the way most people would do. She wasn’t stacking the cups. Rather, she’d cut them into strips and added slits, and was using them like one would build with Lincoln logs. She had used the circular portions for design elements.

As usual, the line to get breakfast was out the door and, as usual, I bypassed the line and claimed a stool marked reserved next to my soon-to-be sister-in-law.

She was dressed in brown cargo pants and a very thick brown wool sweater with large wooden buttons. On her head was a green fleece cap that barely covered a long mass of brown hair that seemed to have a mind of its own. Her blue eyes—the same shade as Quinn’s—flitted to me when I claimed my seat then moved back to her tower. Upon closer inspection, it looked more like a complicated gate than a tower.

“You’re engaged,” she said. Her deeper than was typical for a female voice held some amusement.

I nodded, studied the sharp angles of her face. Physically, she was the female version of Quinn, but without the muscles. Certainly, she was fit—likely due to all the physical labor involved in caring for animals, welding metal, and fixing cars—but she was thin, willowy, and two inches taller than me.

Tangentially I noted that she wasn’t pretty—just like Quinn would never make a pretty female—but something about her was striking, beautiful. She was like a lady-hawk. At least, I thought she was beautiful.

A very small smile curved her mouth. “It’s about time. When is the wedding?”