The bones of what you believe
Chapter 11: Gun
A few days later.
What if Quinn was right? Carrie wondered. She looked at her hands. They looked older than the rest of her. Your hands show your true age, isn't that what people said? She chuckled and studied her hands closely. The broken nails. The worn skin. All those little lines.
I'm old, Carrie realised. Maybe I was always old, she amended. The young have illusions. The old have delusions. Not the same thing.
She had always thought of the CIA as a weapon. She used it to keep the world and, by extension, herself safe. What if she'd been deluding herself? What if, instead of using the CIA as a means to defend herself, she was shooting herself in the foot with it like some amateur?
One day, Angie will be asking the same questions, Carrie thought, and what will I say?
I loved your father and he loved me. We were doomed right from the start. The company I work for left him to die and I could do nothing but watch. And after your father there was this guy and he was crazy about me and about you and he would have been great for us, but I couldn't walk away. I believed that I was doing something valuable. But now, looking back, it's hard to remember what I accomplished while it's ridiculously easy to remember all the things that went wrong. Sometimes things didn't go wrong. That was worse. People died, but they were supposed to die. Was it worth it? You know, I never really asked myself that question back then. Or, if I did, I never answered it.
What a weak, unsatisfying answer. Seriously. Once Angie had learned everything there was to learn about her father, she would ask about the other guy, of course. The guy who came after. The question Carrie most dreaded was: did you love him?
It was a thing that had been nagging at her for some time now. Since Quinn had told her that he loved her, she'd been asking herself whether that could be true. Why did it matter, though? What was it to her if Quinn loved her or not? It made no difference, right? It shouldn't mean a thing one way or another. Unless she loved him.
Well, did she? Did she love Quinn?
She loved it when he laughed. It made him seem like a real human being.
She loved that he was always on her side. Even when her side was a miserable place to be and it was just the two of them there.
She loved the way he looked at her. Saul and Virgil had said that he looked at her a little too long, a little too intense, but that wasn't it. Quinn looked at her as if she was everything. As if she was breaking his heart just by existing. As if there was nothing in the world he wouldn't do for her if she asked him. And there was this sort of nonchalance about it as if it was fucking normal to feel that way about someone.
She loved thinking about him. She thought of him much more than she should.
Yeah, she probably loved him, which posed a new question. Was she willing to give up the things she loved for love?