and Quinn had a much more aesthetically pleasing house than she’d had yesterday.
Gavin must not have mentioned his theories to anyone else, because no one gave her any side-eyed looks or questioned what had happened. The opposite, actually. When she explained she’d been using her textbooks as an end table, Finn and Charlie went and grabbed one that had been sitting in their garage. Anne brought over an extra comforter to replace the one that had been destroyed, Violet brought some curtains.
Most of her clothes hadn’t actually been damaged—a fact that hadn’t been lost on Gavin, she noticed. And she had to admit, it was pretty incriminating that most of the damage had been done to items that didn’t necessarily belong to her.
She didn’t have a chance to talk to Baby until everyone had left, and he looked over at her. “Why don’t we go by the Frontier and grab a bite to eat?”
She stood staring at him. “Aren’t you going to ask me if I did it?”
“Do you really think I think you did this to your own place?” If that was true, then why did he seem so distant?
“Gavin certainly made some compelling points.”
“Do I think you did this?” He held his hand out toward her clean and newly decorated house. “No. I think it’s Gavin’s job to look at all the angles, and I can understand why he has concerns, but no, I don’t think you did this.”
“I didn’t do it in Cambridge, either,” she said softly. “At least, not the break-in at my office.”
“But the other stuff?”
Shame colored her cheeks, and she didn’t want to look him in the eyes. “The part about me screaming at my ex and being hauled out by security is true.”
“I’ve been screamed at by a couple of exes in my time.” He smiled at her with a boyish grin before crossing to her and pulling her into his arms. She sighed and snuggled into him. He really did believe her. But she needed to tell him the whole story. Yeah, Peter had been to blame for a lot of what had happened, but that didn’t mean she was completely innocent.
“I need to tell you everything that happened in—”
“Tell me over dinner.”
Baby ordered at the Frontier without looking at the menu. He seemed to always be able to do that, which made Quinn wish she was able to make him some home-cooked meals to surprise him a little. But she wasn’t much of a cook. Maybe she would take him someplace he’d never been to.
“There’s not too much to tell about Peter and the divorce. Honestly, there was surprisingly little drama surrounding the whole thing. People made it sound like I lost my mind when he started dating Nancy, but honestly, we’d been divorced for nearly eighteen months by then. Peter dating her wasn’t a problem for me.” She took a bite of the burger that Baby’s sister, Wavy, had brought over.
“But something about him with her bothered you?”
She studied him for a moment as she chewed. For someone who worked with cars, he was amazingly good at reading people.
“Yes, you’re right. But it wasn’t Nancy per se that bothered me. It’s all so tied together. Last year was the worst year in my career. Everything that could go wrong did. You should know that some of what Gavin said is the truth.”
“Which parts?” He took a bite of his chicken sandwich.
“I did lose the grades of one hundred fifty students. Or, my computer did. I can’t blame the university for thinking it was my fault. When the IT department looked at my computer, everything seemed to be fine. Their best tech told the university police that the only way the information could have been deleted was if it had been done on purpose.”
“So they thought you’d deleted the grades of one hundred fifty students out of the blue?”
Her heart warmed at the utter disbelief in his voice.
“Well, it gets worse. Peter had gone public with Nancy a few months before. Then I lost details on some other research projects, because of a different computer issue. After that, I finally bought myself a new one.”
“But by then more damage had been done.”
“It was my fault. I didn’t lose the grades or projects on purpose, but they were all still my mistakes. Even I couldn’t figure out what the problem was. Some people said it was because I wanted more attention like I’d had with that scholarship bust. Others said I was