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Afterwards, it's bad.
Empty bottles in the trash, the sink, the floor. Clothes pile up behind his bedroom door and make it hard to open.
Words are slurred and eyes are bleary, bloodshot, shining.
He turns the TV on and off and on then off again and the remote hides itself beneath the couch.
A paid suspension for beating the shit out of a perp who couldn't stop running his mouth.
Batista and Masuka stage an intervention and haul his sorry ass out to Batista's restaurant whilst the cleaner they hired works in his apartment.
They pack up her things together. Masuka takes the kitchen, which is pretty easy because there's nothing in her fridge.
Batista takes the living room, carefully sorting through each item and trying to decide what to keep, what to donate, what to throw. He holds a photo frame of her and Dexter in his hands and doesn’t move for a while.
Batista and Masuka have lost two friends.
Quinn has no space to mourn Dexter too.
He sorts out her bedroom. Finds a bottle of pills in her nightstand and feels nauseous. Picks up an old shirt off the floor that still smells like her, and does nothing else that day until Batista sends him home with it.
Batista suggests they put Dexter's headstone with Rita’s. Masuka asks if Deb would want to be near her parents. Quinn says that you can't separate them so they pay for two empty graves in the same cemetery as Rita.
It reminds him about the bodies they built a foundation on. Lundy's, Christine's, Rita's. Would it have always ended like this?
They have just one funeral.
And then the last of the Morgans are gone. Harrison disappears into the piles of cold cases left in the basement. There's a lot of cold cases when it comes to missing kids.
Batista tells him it gets easier. That it did, after Maria. Quinn thinks Batista is a liar.
He goes home and lies on his bed and wonders if Dexter was the only person who responded to Deb's death appropriately.
Then… life moves on.
He goes back to work. People die every day and sometimes it's by murder so his job isn't going anywhere. At least that's consistent.
Some days he goes home and thinks she'll be there. Those days he often wakes up with a head so foggy it's a problem at work.
Masuka wants to introduce him to a friend at a party. It's too soon, Quinn says. It's been a year, Masuka says.
He decides to track down Nadia. Makes it all the way to Vegas just to be told she moved away. Nobody can tell him where. He calls Jamie, who tells him she's sorry for him but not to call her again.
Six months later he meets his future wife through a date Batista arranges for him. Batista knows her because she's his uncle’s friend’s son’s neighbour’s daughter. Or something like that.
Her name's Amelia. She's sweet and shy and teaches kindergarten and Quinn can't understand why Batista thought he would ever like her. Then she asks to meet him again and he can't find the words to say no.
On the second date he realises Batista picked somebody as unlike Deb as he could.
She moves in with him and points at a photo on his bookshelf, and asks if that's Deb. It is. Quinn prepares for her to take it down but instead she says it needs dusting.
He takes a long time to fall in love again and when he does, it feels like betrayal. Amelia makes him get a therapist.
They talk about getting married. He knows now that it's the sort of thing you should talk about before asking. They decide to wait.
Batista makes a big time arrest. Completely cripples the drug scene in Miami (at least for a few weeks) and they give him an award and make him captain.
Miller becomes Lieutenant. Quinn makes Sergeant. He jokes with Bastita about it. What, have I finally grown up now or something? Batista makes a face halfway between a smile and a grimace.
They always do shots on New Year's now. It starts with one for LaGuerta. Then Deb. Then Dexter.
Amelia is his plus one to Batista's wedding. She catches the bouquet. Quinn starts shopping around for engagement rings. He can't give her Deb’s. It's not fair.
The day he plans on proposing she sends him a ‘We need to talk’ text. He knows he won't survive another heartbreak like that. He's too scared to go home and drives around in his car until 1am. Then he jumps the fence to the cemetery and goes to see her.
He thought it would bring him closure (the word his therapist liked to use, told him he needed to find, before Quinn stopped going) but he knows Deb isn't here.
Literally, they lost her body after Dexter took it from the hospital. But he also knows that the only thing here are flowers and two headstones. It's ironic. This is the only place her ghost doesn't haunt him.
Somebody's left fresh flowers on her grave. Just hers, not Dexter's, which is odd because most people who loved Deb also loved Dexter.
Not to mention it's been almost five years.
When he finally goes home, Amelia is crying. He braces himself for the bad news but she throws herself at him and tells him how worried she was.
Quinn doesn't understand. The ring box burns in his pocket.
She's pregnant, she tells him. He gets down on one knee right then and there.
They don't manage to get married before they have their son. They don't manage to get married before they have their daughter two years later. They get married on a beach with two children under five and everything that could go wrong goes wrong but it's one of the happiest days of his life.
After the honeymoon is over, he realises that he hadn't felt her ghost at all.
Miller transfers departments. He becomes Lieutenant.
He gets everything he wanted. The job, the wife, the kids, the blue house in the suburbs. Even the golden retriever puppy he always wanted when he was a kid.
He stops thinking about her. He doesn't stop loving her.
He only realises this when his daughter has boy trouble in high school, and in the middle of her tearful lament on her bedroom floor throws her head back and wails “How can he even say he likes both of us? You can't be in love with two people at the same time that's not how it works.”
Amelia hugs her daughter and looks at him over her shoulder. This is when he should say something, he knows.
But her name gets stuck in his throat, and eventually his daughter figures things out for herself.
Both of their kids go to college. Quinn thought everybody exaggerated the financial drain that would cause but finds out he was wrong the hard way.
They decide to downsize and as the kids (adults now, he supposes. Where did the time go?) help them pack, his son finds an engagement ring that Quinn had thought he'd lost years ago.
“What's this Dad?”
Amelia gives him that look again. She never asks about Deb. She wants him to tell her. She's always wanted him to tell her.
Her name sounds foreign on his tongue. He tells them how it started (with a haircut) and how it ended (with a bullet). He tells them everything in-between. Even the parts where he might come across as an asshole. Even the parts where he definitely comes across as an asshole.
Then when he's done his son says ‘Oh. It's a nice ring though’ and begins looking through his childhood drawings instead. His daughter gets up to take the dog for a walk.
He feels like he laid his soul bare and his children were only vaguely interested. Quinn tells his wife this, later, and she kisses his cheek and tells him that it's a lot to come to terms with.
“I love you.” He says.
“I know, Joey.”
“Just.. just because I loved her first—”
“Joey, I know. Do you think I would have stayed all these years if I didn't know you love me?”
“You don't feel like… Like this is something that's been between us this whole time?”
“No. Do you?”
“No! No, it's different, completely different. I was worried you'd be upset.”
“I’m not upset. Because it's not something between us. It's between you and her. I'm just sorry that you've had to carry this alone for so long.”
“I don't deserve you.”
“Well considering I'm the one who's done all the cooking for over twenty years, I can say you definitely don't,” She laughs, and turns the bedside lamp off.
He watches himself turn grey in the mirror. Watches the lines in his face grow more severe, watches his skin begin to soften and sag.
Quinn retires the same year he becomes a grandfather.
And only lives for nine months after that.
It's not a bad retirement. They decide to get a boat, and spend most of their time on the water. Amelia lets her hair go white at the roots and it seems to sparkle under the Miami sun. It's odd, Quinn thinks, that he can love her just as much now, as he did so many years ago.
That evening, when he climbs into bed his joints creak as loudly as the old frame does. Amelia mutters something about having to replace it, her crochet hook nimbly darting around in her hands.
He responds in an unintelligible murmur about replacing it tomorrow, and closes his eyes.
When he opens them, he's in the elevator of the precinct, case file tucked under his arm. He feels about thirty years younger again.
The doors slide open.
Nobody's there.
Or at least, that's what he thinks initially, until he sees her at his desk.
Deb's reading a case file, half reclined in his seat, resting her feet on his desk. She looks up when he walks into the empty bullpen.
“Fucking took you long enough,” Deb tosses the file onto the floor and stands up.
Quinn can't seem to find the right words.
“Everyone else has gone to the beach. They got bored waiting,” She stuffs her hands into the pockets of her jeans as she walks over to him. There's something awkward about it, as if she's not sure that she should.
He hugs her for the first time in far too long. Pulls her so closely against him, it's like she'll disappear if he doesn't hold onto her as tight as he can. He grips her shirt with his fingers, and it feels so real. Even her hair smells the same as he remembers.
Deb hugs him just as tightly back. She feels like she's melting against him, burying her face into his shoulder.
“I missed you too,” She whispers.