Tara Taylor Quinn - The Friendship Pact

“’Course I do, baby,” Daddy said. “I’m just being a silly old man, having trouble giving up my girl.” We were at the door to the sanctuary.

“You’re not getting rid of me that easily,” I told him, clutching his elbow for all I was worth. Mom had worried that I might stumble in my shoes. I hardly even knew I was wearing the four-inch spike heels. I’d taken years of ballet, so walking on the balls of my feet came naturally.

“I’m proud of you, Koralynn,” Daddy leaned over to say as we walked through the door and the music swelled. “You’ve made my life perfect...”

The way I figured it, Mom and Daddy had given me a perfect life. So perfect that sometimes I worried that something bad would happen to spoil it all. Obviously I was prone to irrational worries...

I smiled as Daddy and I started up the long aisle, excited and a bit uneasy, too, as I met the eyes of so many people I’d known my whole life. Everyone I loved was in that room. Would we ever be together like this again?

For a happy occasion?

My gaze sought Bailey’s. She was up there waiting for me. Jake was up there, too. Waiting for Bailey, or at least that was my theory. And I hoped my best friend would find the strength to open her heart to him before he moved on.

“You made a good choice,” Daddy leaned over to tell me.

I nodded. Smiled. And then I saw Danny. We’d talked about whether his tux should be brown or black. His shirt gold or rose colored. I forgot all of it as I looked him right in the eye and knew that my life was just beginning.

I wasn’t marrying this man because my parents liked him. Or because, as Bailey said, he was crazy about me. Plain and simple, I was marrying him because I couldn’t imagine life without him.

October 2008

Hands trembling, I sat down on the cold hard chair next to my best friend, took her into my arms and held on.

“Oh, my God, Kor. Oh, my God.” Bailey’s voice was muffled against my neck.

“I’m right here, sweetie. And I’m not going anywhere.”

Bailey’s older brother, Brian, accompanied by his state-supported part-time caregiver, was on a flight up from Florida, but wasn’t due for another couple of hours. Which left Bailey and me alone in the ICU family waiting room.

“Oh, God, Kor, I didn’t...I had no idea....”

Nestling my face against her hair, I spoke just above her ear. “There’s no way you could have known,” I said. Bailey’s mother’s life had been like a roller coaster since before Bailey was born. Who could have predicted that this latest divorce would cause her to...

“He was a judge,” Bailey said. “How could I possibly think she’d win against a judge?”

“You trusted the justice system,” I told the woman who was currently ranked at the top of her class in her last year of law school.

“This is the man who used his power to get out of paying every single contractor they’d hired to remodel their house. Threatening those companies, saying he’d cause difficulties from the registrar of contractors, was wrong. And that’s only the beginning of his duplicity,” Bailey said. “But he wins.”

She sat, seemingly staring at nothing, her expression more vacant than I’d ever seen it. Worse even than the night she’d told me about Stan, the pedophile asshole who should be in prison for what he’d done to her.

I thought, for the hundredth time, that I shouldn’t have promised Bailey I’d keep her secret. I should have told Mom. Should have known that Bailey would need counseling, at the very least. Instead, I’d helped her lock herself deep inside and now, all these years later, I feared she’d never find her way out again.

“He had her arrested for driving her own car,” she reminded me.

“It was in his name.”

“But she’d had exclusive use of it since they’d purchased it,” she said. “And he’d never told her she couldn’t continue to drive it after they separated. Sending his deputy after her was clearly a misuse of power.”

Which didn’t matter at the moment. What mattered was that Bailey’s mother was on life support, lying in a hospital bed a few doors away, because she’d attempted suicide earlier that evening.

“He’s going to pay for what he did.” I offered her what I could.

“He’s a judge, Kor,” she said again. “He doesn’t just know how to work the system. He is the system. And he’s connected to everyone else who’s part of it, too.” Bailey’s voice sounded dead. But at least she was talking.

“By law he’s held to a higher standard, not a lower one,” I said.

Bailey sat up, the expression in her eyes bleak. “And who’s going to prosecute him? An attorney who’ll have to appear before him? An attorney whose paying clients will be facing him at some point in the future? Because it’s damn sure that my mother, a five-time-divorced paralegal who has a history of problems with alcohol abuse and has had numerous affairs, including one with this very same judge, hasn’t got a chance.”

“It was the right thing to do, to report his misuse of power. To report the contracting debacle.” I clung to the one time Bailey’s mother had had enough backbone to stand up for herself.

Because Bailey had stood behind her and guided her all the way, and I wasn’t going to have my friend beating herself up about it.

I clung to what I knew was right. What Bailey believed was right. And I clung to my friend, giving her every ounce of strength I had.

“Anyway, when I said the judge was going to pay, I wasn’t talking about paying in a court of law,” I added softly as the silence ticked slowly by. “The one thing he’ll never be able to escape is his own karma. Somehow or other, he’ll pay for this....”

An hour passed with no sight of the doctor. No further word. We were waiting for them to stabilize her so we could see her. Bailey and I walked down the hall for cups of weak, machine-dispensed coffee. At half past midnight, we were the only nonemployee, nonpatient people in the waiting room.

“Danny probably wants you home.” Bailey’s voice sounded loud in the corridor as we walked back to our seats for the umpteenth time.

Hard to believe I’d been married for over five years. Seemed like five weeks. And forever, too. Danny was my life. Danny and Bailey.

“He wants me right where I am,” I told her. He’d offered to come to the hospital with me, but I knew Bailey needed me there alone. And he’d been fine with that. Bailey had been in my life longer than he had.

Danny might not be close to Bailey, but he didn’t ever get in the way of our connection. He respected its sacredness. Half an hour later, our coffee cups empty, we moved from chairs to the couch farther back in the room. Bailey’s shoulders were drooping, her long dark curls falling limply around her face. Putting my arm around her shoulders, I pulled her against me. Danny had already called the sub line for me, requesting a substitute teacher the next morning.

“We’ll get through this,” I assured her. “You and me. Together.”

“I know.”

“I love you, Bail.”

“Love you, too.”

* * *

With her head on Koralynn’s shoulder, Bailey contemplated sleep—the same kind of sleep her mother had embarked on when she’d taken an overdose of sleeping pills eight hours earlier.

The kind where you didn’t have to worry about waking up.

And there was the difference between her and Mom. She thought about it. Mom did it.

“I should’ve been with her,” she said. Mom had called. Wanted to meet for dinner. Bailey had a moot court competition in the morning and had put her mother off in favor of preparing to win the case. She wasn’t just vying for grades; a win could give her the positioning she’d need to get on with a reputable firm as soon as she graduated.