Tara Quinn - The Friendship Pact

I knew better, of course. Bailey wanted a family even more than I did, or as much as I did, and that was saying a lot.

But Jake pushed her, and that never worked. You had to let Bailey come to you. Let her make her choices in her own time.

Danny didn’t get the finer points of dealing with someone as complicated as Bailey. And he’d grown weary of my friend. Resulting in a couple of the biggest fights we’d ever had. One on Christmas night, of all times. Christmas of 2009 had gone down in history as the worst Christmas of my life.

After a big family dinner with my folks, including both of Danny’s parents, their respective spouses, and Jake and Bailey, too, Danny and I had gone home and spent the entire evening alone. In separate rooms in our three-bedroom house.

Jake had asked Bailey to marry him in front of the whole family. Which wasn’t something you did to Bailey. You didn’t put her on the spot like that. Publicly and without warning. And particularly when it involved something as far-reaching and personal as marriage.

Shocked, she’d said the first thing that had come to mind. No.

I cared about Jake. Cared that he was hurting.

But I loved Bailey. And knew that Bailey’s breaking up with Jake now, three months after the disastrous proposal, meant only one thing. That she loved him and was scared. So, just as Danny was meeting Jake, I had to get to Bailey.

I found her alone in the tiny office she’d been allotted in the family law firm she’d hired into even before she’d passed the bar exam the previous summer.

“You really should lock the door when you’re here alone,” I told her, wishing she wasn’t sitting there so prim and proper and lawyerlike behind the desk that was almost as big as the room. I wanted to give her a hug.

Because I could tell she needed one.

“Diane just left.”

I knew Diane Langdon, Mayer and Mayer’s receptionist, due to my frequent visits to the firm. Bailey had turned into a regular workaholic and more often than not, I had to drag her away to spend any time with her at all.

“All the more reason to lock up,” I said now, dropping down into the small leather chair across from her.

“We share the floor with the offices of two private security companies and the building has a doorman and a guard as well.”

People still walked in off the street, and creeps didn’t all look creepy. But I let it go. I had a different battle to fight at the moment.

Bailey pretended to study the brief open on her desk. I say pretended because I saw the way her eyes moved quickly across the page. Bailey was precise and deliberate in her study. Her eyes didn’t dart like that when she was focused.

But I gave her a second to pretend anyway. To prepare herself to hear me. She looked beautiful; with her dark brown hair and big brown eyes, Bailey would always be striking, but right now, she was in her prime. Her body was even more perfect than it had been in college—a little fuller, and yet not an ounce heavier. Her skin was soft with a hint of tan. I knew how fascinating she was to men—I’d seen their reactions. Which brought me to Jake.

“You’ve finally admitted to yourself that you’re in love with him.” I didn’t bother with any preamble. This was Bailey. And me. And as we got older, as we ventured separately into the world, into our own careers and societies, I realized, more than ever, the incredible value of our friendship. Of the instinctive way we understood each other’s thoughts and feelings. In a world of subterfuge and keeping up appearances, having Bailey in my life was one of life’s greatest miracles.

“Let it go, Kor.”

“I can’t do that.”

She glanced up then to catch me staring at her. Hard. I was wearing my “I mean business” expression. I was careful not to overuse it, so I reserved it for only the most critical situations.

This was clearly one. My husband and I were heading for another of our rare fights—over Bailey and Jake, as usual—but I didn’t care about that as much as I cared about Bailey ruining her life.

“You’re in love with him and it scares you, so you broke things off. You’ve been cutting off your nose to spite your face since we were six years old.”

She’d know exactly what I was referring to.

“You can’t still hold me accountable for saying I didn’t want to be your friend.”

“But the point is, you’re still doing it. You were afraid I’d only be your friend for a little while, remember? That I’d get tired of you.” Because she hadn’t lived in a beautiful big house like I had. Even back then, in our innocence, we’d recognized the differences between us. “You told me you cried yourself to sleep that whole weekend,” I reminded her.

“I’m not six years old anymore.”

“But you cried after you had lunch with Jake today, didn’t you?”

She’d reapplied her makeup. I could tell because she’d used the eyeliner she carried in her purse, which smeared more than the expensive department store liner she used at home. “He’s a nice guy,” she said, shuffling papers and folders as though she had an important court date to get to. Court had been out of session for more than an hour. “I hurt him and that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to avoid for most of this past year.”

“I know.” I could feel her pain on Jake’s behalf. Shared it, even. But I couldn’t worry about Jake, nor could I worry about Danny right now. Bailey needed me. At twenty-eight we were still young, but that wouldn’t last forever, and if she didn’t find the courage to live soon, she’d run out of time. “Tell me you don’t love him and I’ll drop this.”

“I’ve told him since day one, before day one, that I am not going to get married,” she said, dropping the papers and looking me straight in the eye.

It was a look that begged me to trust her. To support her while she made the choices she had to make.

That look had always worked on me. Until now.

“What happened?” I asked while I tried to figure out how to help her. Something was telling me that we were breaking new ground and I had to step carefully so I could help Bailey have the life she wanted. I’d known for a long time that I was the only person who really knew her. Everyone else, including my parents who adored her, thought she should be left alone to pursue her own course. But Bailey had made me promise, the night her mother died, that I’d never do that—never leave her alone in the hell of her own thoughts.

She’d been so good at convincing everyone that she was strong and capable and self-sufficient that I was the only one in her life who knew the real, bone-deep Bailey Watters. I was the only one who saw all her insecurities.

Jake was privy to some of them.

Which was why he’d held on for so long.

And would continue to hold on. I just had to get Bailey to ask him to come back to her.

Climbing Mount Everest might have been easier.

“Did he show you the ring?” I’d seen it—on Christmas Day, after Bailey had left and the rest of us tried to pick up the pieces of a meal gone awry. And again on Valentine’s Day. We’d double-dated with Jake and Bailey on an overnight trip to Atlantic City. Jake had been planning to propose and then get Bailey to an all-night chapel to seal the deal. Danny and I were to have been their witnesses.

Anytime he’d gotten close to asking, Bailey had preempted the request with one diversion after another until Jake, figuring that he was setting himself up for another rejection, had dropped it. The entire trip had been exhausting beyond measure. For all four of us.

“What ring?” The sharpness in Bailey’s tone told me I’d misstepped. Shit.

I held my tongue between my teeth.

“He bought me a ring?”