Miracle by Danielle Steel

started counseling other parents like me. I'm not sure I'm a big help to them, but at least I've been there. And three nights a week I work for a suicide hotline for teenagers.
    They call-forward a line to me, and I can do it from home. I'm not sure if it's a good thing or not, but at least I feel like I'm doing something to help someone, instead of just sitting home and feeling sorry for myself.”
    Quinn wondered if that kept the wound open for her, but in spite of a look of sorrow in her eyes, she seemed to be a fairly well-balanced person. He wondered where her husband was, but didn't want to ask her. She volunteered the information a short time later on her own.
    “I probably would have gone back to work by now, but Andrew's death kind of unsprung my marriage. I think my husband and I blamed each other for what we couldn't change or stop. Things had been shaky between us for a while, and in the year after Andrew's death, the marriage fell apart completely. He walked out two days after the anniversary of Andrew's death. Our divorce was final the week after Christmas.” She said it in a strangely matter-of-fact voice, as Quinn realized that that was when he first met her, and an instant later, she confirmed what he had thought. “I got the papers in the mail the day the storm hit on New Year's Eve. The storm seemed like a suitable end to all of it. I must have seemed like a crazy person the day I talked to you,” she said apologetically. “I'm not even sure I was coherent. I was pretty upset.”
    “You seemed fine to me,” Quinn said reassuringly, remembering her standing in the pouring rain without a raincoat or umbrella. There had been something devastated in her face when she told him she had Niagara Falls in her kitchen. And now he understood it better. She seemed to have no need to hide what she was feeling, and he suspected that she felt better now. Better enough to come to dinner at least, and he was suddenly glad that Jack had pressed him to invite her. More than anything else, this woman needed friends to distract her. They were like three souls in a lifeboat. And for the moment, Quinn was rowing. And he suddenly decided to share something with her, if only to let her know that she was not alone in her agony, and would survive it.
    “My son died twenty-three years ago, in a boating accident,” he confided as he set his fork down and looked at her across the table, as Jack watched them. He had never heard that from Quinn before, and was deeply touched by the admission. The only child Quinn had mentioned to him was Alex, in Geneva. “He was thirteen, and I think I only realized recently how deeply it changed both of us. I withdrew even deeper into my work, and my wife became more introverted and stayed that way. We were both grief-stricken, but when I read her journals, after her death, I understood better how profoundly it altered her. I was busy then, and probably insensitive about it. I'm sure I wasn't much help to her. It was too painful for me to talk about, so I seldom, if ever, did. She wrote some beautiful stories about him.” There were tears in his eyes as he spoke, and he didn't confess to her that he had forced Jane to put away Doug's things within weeks after he died. And the little she had kept unboxed, she had concealed from Quinn in her closet. In a sense, he had forced her to do that, and now that he understood what it had meant to her, he deeply regretted what he'd said and done. He had thought he was doing the right thing for her, for himself, and even for Alex. But now he knew he'd been wrong. He had learned so much about her and himself in the months since she'd been gone.
    “It's not a great thing to happen to a marriage,” Maggie said, looking at Quinn. Her eyes bored into his like drills, as though asking a thousand questions. She wanted to ask him how he had survived it, or how his wife had. She still blamed herself for the end of her marriage.
    She had always felt that her