29. Reinforcements
REINFORCEMENTS
JUNIE
The knock at my door is…calm.
It means my brother has arrived.
I knew he was coming.
After the shock of last night, Fen didn’t take any chances and has been updating me privately on literally everything.
So when I open the door and Nolan steps inside with his arms held out wide, I fall into his embrace.
He doesn’t ask me how I am or what I need him to do.
He just…holds me.
And it’s exactly what I need.
I forgot how much I miss my big brother.
“Junie?”
I squeeze him tighter because if I let go, I’ll cry. I’m not ready to cry yet. Crying means something ends.
“Junebug, I’ll hug you for as long as you need, but it’s getting late, so please tell me you have food because I haven’t eaten in a very long time and I have no idea how late delivery works out here in geriatric world.”
I sniffle against his chest. I do not cry. “I have plenty of food. They have an entire committee devoted to it, I think.” Finally, I release him and lead him by the arm to the small kitchen that I’ve rarely used.
Somehow, I just always ended up in Cole’s.
“Sit. I’ll see what they brought over.”
“I honestly don’t care what it is at this point. Just feed me, Junebug, because I’m about to eat my own arm off.”
Nolan’s the only one who ever called me Junebug.
He stopped using the name when I was in high school and the mean girls started throwing bugs at me in the hallway.
I never did prove that Natalie facilitated that attack, but no one else spent any time in our home, so she’s the most likely culprit even though she had long left high school.
I open a Tupperware of what looks like a pesto pasta, and Nolan rips it out of my hands.
“Geez, Dude. You want a fork?” I ask as he stuffs a big bite into his mouth with his fingers.
He shrugs, but I hand him one anyway.
“Do you want to heat it up?”
“No. I just need sustenance.”
He’s such a dork. It’s such a doctory thing to say.
I sit next to him at the two-person island as he demolishes three-quarters of the container, drinks two glasses of water, and finally washes his hands, all before he turns his blue gaze my way.
His smile is as sad as mine.
“Noley.” Just one word bleeds with all my pain. “You came. All the way from Tokyo.”
“I’ve heard, yes. It’s a bitch of a flight.”
“Mom—” I choke on her name. It’s as close as I come to admitting that she’s hurt me in ways that will never fully heal.
Nolan looks at me with our mother’s eyes and our father’s nose, his elbows resting on the counter between us.
“I’m here, Junie. For you. For Cole. For us. Always. Cole and Hudson will make sure that we all get through this. Fen is going scorched earth against Grace and Natalie now. And I’m here for you.”
That’s when I stop holding it in.
Not the tears that escaped without permission in Hudson’s rental car.
Not the ones that blended in with the water in the shower.
This time, I cry properly, with my whole body, as I slide to the floor just so I won’t fall off my stool.
It’s a release—a lifetime of hatred and never feeling like enough, of never knowing who I was or where I belonged.
And it’s a lot.
Nolan wedges himself in between me and the island, his back resting against the dishwasher, and pulls me into him without speaking.
He holds me to him like he did when I was eight and the boys at school had figured out my mom had forgotten me again, and I weep into the front of his wrinkled button-down.
He doesn’t shush me. With one hand on the crown of my head, he lets me ruin his shirt while he waits.
When I finally pull back, Nolan doesn’t meet my eye with any judgment.
“I—” Hiccup. “I’m sorry about your shirt.”
“I have other shirts, Junie.”
I don’t know what to say next. I’m…untethered. Emotionally. Physically. Lost. “You ate all my pasta.”
He chuckles quietly. “You have other pasta.” He hands me a tissue from a box he managed to grab at some point and stares at me while I blow my nose like a toddler—with no shame and zero fucks to give. “Tell me what you need, Juniper.”
“I—I don’t know.” I sound pitiful. “I really don’t.”
“Okay.” It doesn’t sound okay though.
“Whatever you want to say, just say it, Noley.”
He huffs, but it’s not really a laugh. “So damn pushy. But fine. I need you to know that I’m angry with you both.
I want to be clear about that. I’ve spent the last twenty hours trying to decide which of you I was angrier at, and I gave up somewhere over the ocean.
It’s a tie. But I’m here. I love you. And I’m furious. ”
Unease swirls in my gut. “You’re furious? At me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” I sniff.
“Because you didn’t tell me, Junie. It was my job to take care of you. Literally mandated by the Massachusetts family court, my job to take care of you, and you didn’t tell me.”
“About—” This could go so many ways.
“About Natalie. About what she did to you when you were a fucking teenager. About—Jesus, Junie—all of it. I’m your brother.
My job is to protect you. Cole, Hud, Fen, they all feel the same way.
If you had just used your goddamn voice to tell us about Natalie, she never would’ve been allowed into your life or our home in the first place, but you didn’t say a fucking word. ”
I close my eyes. “I—”
“I’m not asking you to defend yourself. I’m telling you what I’ve been stewing about while cramped on an airplane because if I don’t, I’ll explode. And I might actually fucking kill Tommy.”
Tommy. Not Dad. He’s lost the privilege of being our father, though in truth, that was something he lost years ago.
“I’m not surprised by mo—Anna’s words.” My chest feels like it’s cracking in two. “And Tommy’s part in it doesn’t even scratch the surface of my pain because he’s never been part of my life—not really, anyway. But it still—it hurts. It hurts so much.”
He grunts. “I’m so sorry, Junie. Honestly, I wish I could go back. I knew Anna treated you differently, but I had no idea it was like…that.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Nolan.”
“It wasn’t yours either.”
Dealing with the complicated emotions around my mother will take more time and energy than I have in reserve right now, so I simply nod.
“I don’t know exactly what Tommy did,” Nolan says. “But from what Hud has explained so far, it wasn’t good. If Cole hadn’t intervened, it could’ve really fucked up your life. And I hate to admit it, but I think any of us would’ve done the same thing.”
I frown up at him.
“Seems we all want to protect you but missed that somewhere along the way, you grew up to be a fully capable adult.” He blows out a harsh breath.
“I have a lot of guilt over this, Junebug. About all of it. And I hate that we allowed Natalie into your home when you were vulnerable. None of us ever saw it.”
I bump his shoulder with mine and lower my voice. “Natalie was very good at…manipulating me when I was younger. I truly believed if I spoke up, Cole would hate me, that it would cause a rift between all of you, and I didn’t want to be responsible for that.”
“Nothing and no one could ever come between us. And I promise you, had any of us, Cole especially, known what was happening, we would’ve stopped it. Please tell me you believe that.”
“I-I do. Now.”
“Good.”
He pulls his knees up and rests his elbows on them. The cold cabinet behind me presses into my shoulder blades, but I’m too drained to move.
“We fucked up,” he says on a harsh exhale.
“No, you didn’t. You were also dealing with Anna and med school. Cole was—he is who he is. The boys were holding us together. I didn’t—I didn’t want to add Cole’s girlfriend is torturing me to anyone’s plate. I didn’t always want to be the little girl you all had to worry about.”
He rakes an agitated hand through his hair. “It wasn’t your call to make. You were a child, Juniper.”
“So were you. Maybe not legally, but neither of us walked out of that house without scars.”
I’m not even sure why I keep it. That house was haunted by sadness long before I inherited it.
“I was your legal guardian, Junie. You should’ve known you could always come to me. I failed you there.”
“I don’t see it as a failure, Noley. I think…we were both just doing the best we could.”
“But you’ve had years to tell me since.” The hurt in his tone makes my stomach turn.
“I did.”
He’s quiet, as if he’s reorganizing his thoughts, so I let him. “You made a decision about what the guys and I could handle.”
“It wasn’t a giant leap, Nolan. You were all in college, figuring yourselves out while also dealing with our dying mother and a teenager who was less than cooperative on any given day.”
“You know who else has been making decisions for years about what we can and cannot handle?”
“Cole.”
He nods, clasping his hands over his knees. “Cole.”
I’ve done to Nolan what Cole did to me. Different scale, same mechanics, same psychological trick.
The mirror is exact, yet I’m sitting on my floor furious at Cole, and Nolan is sitting next to me, making me see reason.
“I’m sorry, Nolan.”
He turns his head against the dishwasher and looks at me sideways. “I know. Now, should I be worried about the muffled buzzing coming from your couch cushions?”
“Honestly, the way my life’s been going lately, probably. We should just leave it there—that much buzzing never leads to anything good.”
He slowly shakes his head. “We’re not hiding anymore, Juniper. Our entire family is on this property now. We’re going to face everything that comes our way, together. For you and for Cole.”
Sadness crawls up my neck at a glacial pace.
“Are you going to check it, or do you want me to?”
I get up off the floor, slowly, as though I’m ninety, and retrieve the phone. I drop onto the couch, and Nolan follows a moment later, so I unlock my phone and hand it to him.
“It looks like a lot of Instagram notifications,” I say.
My big brother scrolls.
And scrolls.
And scrolls.
My anxiety is at a bursting point when his face turns a shade of red that isn’t healthy. And that’s saying something because he’s spent years perfecting the doctor face that gives nothing away.
“Junebug?”