10. Our Boy Did It #3
“Something low,” I say. My voice has gone to a place where I can’t retrieve it.
“A minor key.” I worked with musicians at the Berklee College of Music for an entire month on it.
“The winter winds, if the building was positioned correctly, would come from the northeast, so the corridors there would be wider, making the tone drop. It’s…
mournful but not sad. Like remembering someone you loved. ”
At least, that was how the music professor had explained it to me back then.
Junie’s quiet for a long time. The drafting lamp throws warm light across the table between us, making the room feel smaller than it is.
“You designed a memorial that grieves the loss of life with you.”
Fuck me. I can’t speak. I physically cannot form words because she just described in one sentence what I spent three months trying to articulate in my design statement. And she did it standing barefoot in my office at midnight without even trying.
She moves along the table while I try to find my breath.
The community center. The floating greenhouse.
The adaptive housing project. She doesn’t rush as she studies each one with the same careful attention she brings to her spreadsheets.
It’s meticulous focus I’ve never seen anyone else apply to my work.
“Why aren’t you doing this?” she asks.
The question is quiet but lands in a minefield.
“Doing what?” I scratch at my jaw to hide the way my throat works.
“This,” she says more emphatically. “You’re running a retirement community and fixing gutters and arguing with Stanley.
But that’s not who you are. You’re Cole Whittaker, architect.
You design buildings that make people experience an answer without ever recognizing there was a question.
Why are you spending your life replacing porch lights? ”
The words scream in my head with the desperation of six lost years. Because I traded my career for my family and then lost them both anyway.
“The Haven needed me,” I say instead.
“The Haven needs a property manager. This—” She taps the air above the library. “This needs an architect.”
The distinction slices through me with a precision I wasn’t prepared for. The thing I do versus the thing I am. She’s here, drawing a line between survival and purpose, and she has no idea how deep that cut goes.
“It’s complicated.” I didn’t mean to growl at her. I don’t mean the harshness that she hears, but she reacts to the sound accordingly.
It’s complicated. Fuck. The same words I’ve used about Devin, about Natalie, about every truth I can’t afford to tell her.
Her jaw tightens as she files the deflection the way she catalogues Devin’s vendor discrepancies. And I hate that I’m forced into the same category as a thief and liar.
But isn’t that what they’ve turned me into?
Then her eyes fill with the one thing I never wanted to find there—heartache. But she doesn’t push. Instead, she lowers her gaze—it feels as though she’s cut out my heart with the motion—then she moves to the edge of the table where the veterans’ memorial blueprint curls up at the corner.
“What happened to this one? Was it ever built?”
“No,” I lie.
“Why not?”
“It didn’t work out.” The words taste like ash.
Junie stares at me as she processes my answer. I watch her weigh it against every other nonanswer I’ve given her since she arrived. She doesn’t believe me. I can see it in the set of her mouth.
But she gives up on it, just as I fear she’s given up on me.
As she lowers her gaze to drop her file onto my desk, I follow her line of sight moments too late.
She’s staring at the framed photograph, lying down, partially covered by a design, next to the pencil cup she made me for my Master of Architecture graduation.
I see the question before she asks it. The slight tilt of her head. The way her fingers twitch toward it, then pull back. She’s deciding whether to cross a line, and I can’t believe how much I wish she could cross it.
“What’s this?” She doesn’t pick it up. She just gestures at it, giving me the option to lie.
The photograph is of me, standing in front of the memorial rendering in her kitchen. The design I’d planned to submit to Meridian’s internship program. The internship that would’ve catapulted my career. The design that won Natalie my place in that firm.
And I’m not alone in that photo. Natalie’s on one side of me, clenching my arm so tight I walked away with half crescent moons dug into my skin. Junie’s on my other side, and that’s where I’m looking. Only her shoulder and dirty blond hair are exposed now—and that’s what she caught a glimpse of.
If Junie sees Natalie in that photo, she’ll build a story that’s wrong in every direction that matters.
I can’t give her more ammunition for a wound I didn’t cause but can’t mend or even explain.
It’s a photo I keep to remind myself why I heel to Natalie’s manipulations—I’ve only ever wanted Junie.
“It’s just…old stuff…from the firm I applied to years ago,” I say, but I can hear how thin my lie sounds. “From before The Haven.”
Junie’s hand draws back. She meets my gaze and holds it for three beats too long. One for the question, one for my deflection, and one for the hurt she tucks away so cleanly I almost miss it.
Almost.
“Right.” She nods once. Professional. Controlled. The ice slides back into place so seamlessly, it’s like watching a door close in slow motion. “Old…firm…stuff.”
Her gaze darts back to the photo. The wisp of golden hair that can only belong to her. To my gaze that stares not at the camera, but to the girl just to my left.
I want to flip the photo over and explain everything. But telling her means telling her why Natalie’s blackmail works in the first place. And the reason the blackmail works is standing in my office, wearing my grandmother’s ring, staring at me as if I kicked her puppy.
So I say nothing, and Junie finally remembers the folder in her hands. “The insurance filing.”
I take the folder from her, and she’s very careful about not allowing our fingers to touch, but the ring catches the lamplight, and as she pulls her hand away, suspended for one second, my grandmother’s diamond throws a pinpoint of light across the ceiling like a small, private star.
We both watch it. Neither of us acknowledges it.
“I’ll review it.” The words sound like gravel under the tires of a Mack truck.
“Good.” She tucks a strand of damp hair behind her ear. And for one brief moment, I imagine it damp for other, more provocative reasons.
Then she smacks me in the face with her sincerity. “Your designs are—” She presses her middle finger to her temple and presses, hard. “I’m glad Nana Mae entered you in that competition. Not because she wants you to beat Paula Van Holten, but because your work is—”
I take a step forward, unable to stop the pull she has on me.
She glances up, startled, or put off by our sudden closeness, but she doesn’t retreat, even as I take another step forward until we’re sharing air.
This close to her, my body thrums, like she controls the heartbeat and the blood pumping through my veins. I’m electric next to her. Amplified in ways I’ve never considered before.
She’s the half of me that’s necessary for survival, and now I know why I’ve been slowly dying inside. You can’t live when the best parts of you are missing.
“Your work is extraordinary, Cole.”
Her compliment shreds me all the way to my bones.
She says it like a fact. No performance, no flattery. Just a woman who reads the data and gives her findings.
I don’t have a response. Hearing her call my work extraordinary applies pressure to a fracture I thought was starting to heal.
“Goodnight,” she says, backing away from me and hurrying towards the door.
“Junie,” I croak.
She stops but doesn’t turn. She did the same thing when she paused on her stairs after our…conversation on the porch.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Then she’s gone. Bare feet slapping on the hardwood, down the stairs, and across the driveway. The motion sensors kick on as she races up her steps, but she doesn’t turn on her light.
And I wait for it to turn on for a long time. It never comes. Almost as if she knows I need it.
Eventually, my hand lowers to the locked drawer where I keep her blueprints—her dream house, built from conversations she probably doesn’t even remember having.
But this time, I don’t unlock the drawer. This time, the lock feels like protection more than cowardice. Even as I stare at the faces in the photo Junie only saw half of because the frame must have toppled over when I tossed the canister to my design table.
I stand it up now, knowing why I kept it. A reminder of what—of who—I’m protecting and from whom, but now I just want to burn it all because the story this photo tells isn’t about me and Junie. It’s Natalie’s calculated smile. My naivety in believing silence would protect us.
But silence never protected anyone. Silence is the thing that’s killing every chance I ever had with the woman who just walked out of my office, tugging on a diamond ring that refuses to budge.
My phone buzzes.
Junie?
Fen & Tonic:
Fen: Update: Stanley’s newsletter “Wedding Edition” just dropped. There’s a section on catering. Dollie’s volunteered her cake-making skills.
Hudson: Cole. The ring.
Nolan: I’m booking a flight.
I should tell Nolan that the ring is stuck, that nothing happened.
Except something did happen, and I don’t know how long I can keep up the lies. Not the engagement—that’s a comedy of errors I’ll deal with tomorrow. It’s what happens next that has me pocketing my phone before I can respond and then returning to my work.
Not because Nana Mae wants me to beat her rival.
But because a woman who reads blueprints like poetry told me my work was extraordinary.
And for the first time in years, I’m stupid enough to believe her.