Chapter 9
chapter
nine
Juniper
There’s a knock on my door at nine fifteen.
I know it’s Leo before I even check, because I’ve spent the last hour lying on top of the hotel comforter in my pajamas, staring at the ceiling, half-expecting it and half-hoping he’d come find me.
Also, he’s the only one who knows my room number.
I get up, smooth down my hair in the mirror by the door for absolutely no reason, and open it.
He looks like he hasn’t sat still since I left him in the lobby. Same clothes from earlier, hair like he’s run his hands through it more than once, and an expression that’s trying very hard to be calm and isn’t quite landing it.
“Hey,” he says. “I know you said you wanted to turn in. I won’t stay long. I just—I told you I’d explain, and I don’t want to let that sit overnight if I don’t have to.”
“Okay.”
“We can talk out here, if that’s easier. Or downstairs, somewhere public. I don’t want you to feel like you have to let me into your room if today made you uneasy about that. I’d understand completely.”
Something in me softens at that, despite the tight, watchful feeling I’ve been carrying around since the vendor hall. It’s such a Leo thing to say. Because he’s careful and thoughtful about others. And always thinking about my comfort before his own.
“Leo.” I step back, holding the door open. “I’m not scared of you. Whatever this is, I don’t think it’s that kind of thing.”
“You’re sure?”
“I trust your character,” I say, and I mean it, even now, even with the strange cold feeling that’s been sitting in my chest since Eric said the words net worth like they meant something.
“I don’t know what you’re about to tell me.
But I know who you’ve been with me for two days, and that hasn’t given me any reason to be afraid of you. Annoyed, maybe, but not afraid.”
That seems to loosen something in his shoulders. He steps inside, and I close the door behind him. I return to my bed and sit on the comforter and he stands by the desk.
“Okay,” I say, when he doesn’t immediately start. “I’m ready. Lay it on me.”
He exhales. Paces a bit, then stops.
“The truth is,” he says, “I’m rich.”
I wait for the rest of it.
“Like—obnoxiously rich,” he continues. “My family owns a good chunk of land out near Saddle Creek, as well as more land in West Texas. Cattle, like I told you. But there’s also mineral rights under a lot of that land, and we get oil money on top of the ranching income, and it’s—it’s a lot.
It’s been a lot for the last couple generations.
And then I made my own money on top of that with the company.
So it’s not even just family money I’m sitting on.
I built something separately, and that did well too. Very well.”
He stops. Looks at me like he’s braced for something.
I keep waiting.
“And?” I say.
“And?” He frowns. “There’s no and, that’s it.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. I have a lot of wealth, and I don’t lead with it.”
I stare at him for a second, running back through the conversation, certain I’m missing something, because that cannot possibly be the entire weight of what’s been sitting behind his eyes for the last hour.
“Of course you don’t lead with it,” I say slowly. “That’s a reasonable thing to not lead with. Leading with the size of your wallet is basically an open invitation for people who want to poach off your good fortune.” I lean forward, pat the empty part of the mattress in front of me.
He comes and sits, but it’s really just kind of a half-sit/half-lean thing. As if he’s not really committed to sitting on my bed.
“Leo. What’s the actual secret? Is your family secretly running a drug cartel? Is there something horrifying happening with the cattle? Are you, like, structurally inhumane to your cows in a way that would ruin this for me?”
“What? No.” He looks almost offended on behalf of his cattle. “Of course not. None of that. There’s no additional secret hiding behind the first one. I just—have a lot of money. That’s the whole thing.”
“Forbes-list money.”
He nods. “Forbes-list money.”
“Got it.” I sit back, processing this, turning it over, waiting for the part of me that should apparently be reeling right now to actually show up and reel. It doesn’t. Mostly what I feel is mild confusion. “Okay. So why does that feel like it’s been eating you alive since this afternoon?”
“You mean since Eric’s big reveal?”
“He is like an actual super hero villain. But like one of the really bad ones.”
His lips quirk a little. He’s quiet for a second, looking down at his laced fingers.
“Because telling people changes things,” he says finally.
“Every single time. I’ve watched it happen my whole life.
The second someone finds out, there’s this recalibration.
Sometimes it’s small. Sometimes it’s everything.
People start being nicer in a way that doesn’t feel like niceness anymore.
Or they get weird and defensive about not wanting anything from me, which is its own kind of exhausting.
Or they’re weirdly judgmental as if money provides any of the skill or success I possess and my own efforts and work ethic mean nothing. Or—” he stops.
“Or?”
“Or they were never that interested in the first place, and the money becomes the actual reason they stick around. Sometimes you don’t find that part out until you’re already in too deep to walk away cleanly.”
Something in his voice on that last part makes my chest ache.
“You can tell me,” I say quietly.
He looks up at me, and whatever he sees in my face must convince him, because he starts talking, and once he starts, it comes out steadier than I expect.
“There was a girl in high school. Rachel.” He says the name carefully, like it still costs something even now.
“We dated for almost a year. I thought it was real—as real as anything is at seventeen, anyway. Turned out she was far more calculating than I would have imagined. Especially considering her grades in Algebra. In any case, she knew exactly what my family was worth. Knew how it would likely be divided among the family members. Then decided that the amount was sufficient enough to put up with being my girlfriend.” His jaw tightens.
“I found a string of texts to her friend that more or less laid the whole thing out. Strategy notes. She wasn’t subtle once I actually looked at her. ”
“Leo.”
“It’s fine. It was a long time ago.” He says it like he believes it, mostly.
“Rachel doesn’t mean anything to me. But knowing it happened to my dad first made the whole thing feel inevitable, like something that was always going to come for me too eventually.
My uncle was a confirmed bachelor for twenty plus years because of it. ”
“Your mom? And Rachel and others along the way, I’m sure. People kind of suck,” I say.
“I already explained how my mom handled marriage and motherhood. When she finally decided to leave, my dad offered her a settlement to make the whole thing clean and quick instead of dragging it out in front of me for years. She took it. Walked away and barely looked back.” He says all of this evenly, like a fact he’s worn smooth from handling it so many times.
“I’ve never actually asked my dad how much money he gave her. ”
“Does it really matter? It seems like even a single dollar paid to walk away from your child… ” I shake my head.
“I don’t think KiKi’s a monster. I think she just never wanted any of what she ended up with, and the money was the only part of the arrangement that ever made sense to her.
But I grew up watching my dad close himself off, romantically, at least after that.
And then Rachel happened, and it just confirmed everything I’d already decided to believe. ”
I reach over put my hand over his laced fingers, and he goes still under the touch like he wasn’t expecting it.
“So you stopped leading with it,” I say. “The money. You let people get to know you first, and you wait to see if it changes anything once they find out.”
“Something like that.”
“And today, Eric did it for you. Before you got the chance to do it on your own terms.”
“Yeah.” His eyes meet mine, something raw and a little exposed in them.
“And the worst part is, you defended me without even knowing what you were defending me from. You stood there and told him exactly where he could put his comment about my net worth, and I just stood there and let you do it, because I hadn’t earned the right yet to tell you what you were actually fighting for. ”
I sit with that for a moment, turning his hand over under mine, lacing my fingers through his instead.
“For the record,” I say, “I’d have said the same thing even if I’d known. Maybe with extra emphasis.”
Something in his face cracks open at that, something bigger and more substantial than relief.
“I believe you,” he says quietly. “I think that’s actually the part that scares me most.”
“Why would that scare you?”
“Because it means I don’t have an excuse left to keep doing the thing I’ve been doing for fourteen years,” he says. “Which is staying safe by staying guarded. You’re making that a lot harder to justify.”
I should probably say something comforting here, something gentle and reassuring, and some part of me wants to. But there’s another part—the part that’s been sitting with a small, persistent ache since the vendor hall—that needs to say the truer thing first.
“Leo, I need you to know something too,” I say.
“I get why you didn’t tell me. I do. After what you just described, I’d probably build the exact same walls.
But I want you to understand that it still cost me something, sitting in that hallway today, realizing there was a whole part of you I didn’t have access to.
Not because the money matters to me. It genuinely doesn’t.
But because for a few hours today, I felt like I’d been auditioning for something without knowing the test was happening. ”
He flinches slightly, like the words land exactly where I meant them to.
“That’s fair,” he says. “That’s completely fair, and I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to test you. I think I’ve just been so used to bracing for the test happening to me that I forgot what it looks like from the other side.”
“I wasn’t trying to pass anything,” I say. “I was just trying to get to know you.”
“I know.” He turns his hand, threading our fingers properly together. “And for what it’s worth, you did. More than anyone has in a very long time. I just did a bad job of meeting you there with the same kind of honesty.”
We sit like that for a minute, hands joined on the small hotel table, the room quiet except for the distant hum of the air conditioner and someone’s muffled television through the wall.
“So,” I say eventually, mostly to break the heaviness of it, “Forbes list. That’s wild.
I mean Clover and I each have a trust fund that we received when we turned eighteen.
While it’s allowed us to both go to college and live comfortably, no one is writing about us in Forbes.
Do you have, like, a private jet? Should I be worried about my carbon footprint by association? ”
A laugh surprises its way out of him, sudden and real, some of the tension in his shoulders finally easing. “No private jet. I fly commercial out of principle, mostly to annoy my accountant.”
“A man of the people.”
“Something like that.”
I smile, and something in the room settles, the worst of the tightness in my chest finally easing back into something more like the warmth I’d felt all day before Eric showed up with his terrible timing and his terrible mullet.
“I’m not done being a little bit annoyed,” I tell him honestly. “I think I’m allowed a day or two of residual annoyance. But I don’t think I’m angry anymore. Not really.”
“I’ll take residual annoyance,” he says. “That seems fair, given the circumstances.”
“Good. Because I was promised a breakfast tomorrow, and I expect you to still show up for it, regardless of your tax bracket.”
“I wouldn’t dream of standing you up.” He brings my hand up, presses a kiss to my knuckles, slow and deliberate. “Forbes list or otherwise.”