Quinn's Story
Copyright© 2026 by writer 406
Chapter 15
The Colonel wanted to see him. He knew what was coming, so he got ready for it while walking from his room to the Colonel’s office.
The preparation was a practice that seven-year-old Quinn had adopted when he had learned that being called into an adult’s presence without warning was a sure sign of bad news, and when the bad news came, it was easier to take if you were ready for it. He’d refined it through many placements.
By now, it was the way his mind worked. Expect the worst and you won’t be surprised.
As he walked down the corridor toward the Colonel’s office, which was on the ground floor at the back of the house.
He thought: He’s going to send me back.
He looked at this directly, the way he tried to look at everything. The carjacking response had been excessive. Two men hospitalized, one with serious injuries, police coming to the house for him. Excessive violence created complications. Complications were problems. Problems, in his experience, were best resolved by the getting rid of the one causing the problems.
He had been sent away from places for far less.
You’re a troublemaker, boy. A hardcase too smart for your own good.
He arrived at the office door and knocked the way Sullivan knocked — two sharp raps.
“Come in.”
The Colonel’s office was dark wood, ordered surfaces; a desktop bore only what was currently in use: a folder, a pen, a coffee cup. One wall was books, organized with the same precision as the library upstairs but more selective, the volumes on these shelves clearly the ones consulted regularly. Framed maps adorned another wall. Quinn scanned them quickly: a topographic survey of the ranch in Montana, what looked like a military map of a region he didn’t immediately identify. Photographs on the small wall beside the door depicted groups of bearded armed men.
The Colonel was behind the desk.
He did not look up immediately. Quinn stood and waited, using the time to armor his emotions.
Accept it cleanly. Thank him for what’s been given. Do not make it difficult for him or embarrass yourself.
He thought about the Stoics, Marcus Aurelius writing to himself in the campaigns, the discipline of response. He thought about Epictetus on the things within our control and the things outside it, the slave who’d identified freedom as an internal condition rather than an external one. He arranged himself around these ideas the way you brace to take a punch.
When the Colonel finally looked up, Quinn met his eyes squarely.
“Sit down, Quinn.”
Quinn sat, back straight, the first six inches of the seat. He had sat in similar chairs this way, facing authority ever since he was six years old.
He waited for his exile with dumb fatalism.
The Colonel opened the folder on his desk. He looked at it for a moment—not reading, Quinn thought, but gathering himself. Then he closed it, put it aside, folded his hands on the desk in front of him, and looked at Quinn.
“I want to tell you about my family,” he said.
Quinn held still.
What...
The Colonel was quiet for a moment in the way of a man who has decided to say something and is finding the beginning of it.
Then he began:
There were two brothers. The Colonel was the elder by eleven years, which was a gap large enough to make them nearly a generation apart, raised in the same house but in different chapters of it. Their father had died when the younger boy was six—a heart attack, the kind that gives no warning.
The story was a common one; Quinn had heard it many times from kids at different group homes. When a dad died, everything changed, and never for the better.
The elder brother had been seventeen when his father died—old enough to understand what the loss meant in practical terms. He did his best to step into the vacuum, to take on a weight that wasn’t his to carry but was there. He’d finished high school, enlisted in the Army, built a career, and sent money home.
The younger boy grew up with a mother whose grief made her indulgent. She was a woman who could not bear to say no to the boy who remained with her. He grew up away from restriction or consequence. So the boy drifted, always following the line of least resistance.
One of those least resistance paths was drugs. The Colonel knew nothing of this; he was busy running operations in far-off places.
“The younger boy ran away eventually,” the Colonel said. His voice had its usual measured quality but also a note of old pain in it. “He took the girl next door with him. She was nineteen and pregnant.”
Quinn listened.
“I found out about the child later, many years later.” The Colonel picked up the pen on his desk and set it down without using it. “I was not easy to reach in those years. I was in places where communication with the outside world was not possible.” A pause. “I was not a good brother.”
He said it plainly, without the inflation of self-reproach or the deflation of excuse. It landed as a simple, considered fact.
“The brother overdosed three years after the baby was born. From all available reports, she held on longer—another two years. Then she went the same route.”
Quinn had not moved. He had heard variations of this story in group home rooms and social workers’ waiting rooms and family court hallways, told by kids who were the aftermath of it. He had his own version of it. He knew how the story ended.
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