31. Are you okay?
ARE YOU OKAY?
JUNIE
Nolan is still passed out on my couch in a way only doctors and soldiers sleep—fully, instantly, with the assumption that someone will wake them in case of emergency.
He got up to use the restroom at one point when I was working. Then he forced me to eat with him before saying he was just going to rest for a few more minutes. He’s been out most of the day, and the only place in this entire apartment I should not be is at this window.
Yet here I am, staring straight into Cole’s office.
I’m stuck in a war inside my head. There’s a version of me who wants to charge across the driveway in my pajamas, demanding answers, and another version of me who wants to file the questions under quarterly review and never address them.
And somehow, in this battle, everyone is losing.
So instead of picking a lane, I open my curtain—an olive branch.
He leaves his light on—like hope.
As I climb into bed, I decide both things can be true, even if we end up at different destinations in the end.
“Wakey-wakey.” Katie’s slightly shrill voice startles me from a deep sleep, and I almost roll right out of bed.
“Sorry,” Nolan grumbles. “She said she’s your best friend and deserves to see for herself that you’re okay.” I don’t have to open my eyes to know he’s staring at her with suspicion. “I only let her in because Fen corroborated her BFF status.”
“Debatable,” I groan.
The sun has decided on happiness today, and I want to throw a trash bag over it to plunge us all back into darkness.
“Come on, spill.” Katie flops herself onto my bed, tucking her arms behind her head like this is a completely normal thing for a forty-year-old woman to do.
“I can only hold off the Safe Haven Wellness Committee for so long. You gotta give me something, otherwise they’ll all end up on your doorstep again. ”
Cracking one eye in Nolan’s direction, I almost laugh. He’s somewhere in the middle of tossing Katie out on her ass and letting her bamboozle me.
“It’s fine,” I tell him. “She won’t go away until she gets what she came here for.”
Katie’s purse clinks as she holds it above my prone body. “I brought mimosas.”
“Ah.” I don’t remember seeing Nolan ever look this uncomfortable. “I do have to go check on some…things.”
I nod and drag myself to a semi-sitting position.
“Nana Mae set the boys up at the clubhouse,” Katie says while dragging two collapsible champagne glasses from her bag. “Fenway and Hudson have an entire war room set up.”
“Why? How long are they staying?”
The panic must show on my face because Nolan offers a placating smile I hate.
“Indefinitely,” he says. “We all are.”
I wasn’t consulted on this. But I’m also probably too tired to fight it.
Freaking Boston boys.
“Fine,” I sigh. “Go do what you have to do.”
Nolan comes close, then kisses the side of my head so he can whisper, “I won’t be far. If you need a rescue, call me.”
Katie snorts. She’s practically on top of me, so there’s no way she missed Nolan’s words.
“We’ll be fine,” she says, handing me a mimosa she poured from a small hot-pink thermos.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” he grumbles, but he leaves me alone with my annoying best friend.
I eye the mimosa, and then Katie. “Do you have a drinking problem I need to be aware of?”
“No.” She rolls her eyes. “Bea says I use alcohol as a social crutch because I don’t trust that I’m interesting enough on my own to hold anyone’s attention. I blame my ex, but we’re not here to talk about me.”
“Katie—”
When did I turn into someone who can’t recognize when someone else is hurting? This is definitely a character flaw to work on.
“No bullshit,” she says, and I’m not prepared when she levels me with the most serious expression I’ve ever seen on her.
Her bubbly concoction helps me swallow my nerves.
“There’s no testosterone here now, no family bonds forcing you to make peace. It’s just you.” She furrows her brow. “And me.”
I take another small sip.
“Are you okay? And remember, I said no bullshit. I don’t want a manufactured answer. I don’t want what you’d tell Nana Mae, your brother, or those man-children all trying to outmaneuver the cunts in your life. I want the honest, broken, real answer, Junie. Are you okay?”
As far as best friends go, I could have seriously done worse. I have done worse, actually. Way. Way. Worse.
For all of Katie’s quirks, she’s only ever tried to be there for me. And she’s never once asked for anything in return.
I’ve never had a friendship where I wasn’t carrying all the weight of it.
That’s the only reason I have for opening my heart and telling her the truth. “I don’t know.”
She nods like she understands. Like she’s been there before and knows what it’s like to feel lost.
And she doesn’t judge.
She simply allows me to…be.
Katie just might be the friend I never wanted but have always needed.
Numbers have always made more sense to me than people. But by two that afternoon, even numbers need a translator.
Somehow, instead of the Q3 spreadsheet I was trying to get lost in, I end up following a rabbit hole of small business owners who have all been taken advantage of.
Many of them are from women-led companies.
Most of them simply trusted the wrong person—which focuses my anger and sadness into something almost productive.
Because I know how that is.
The deeper I dig, the more alive I become.
Variance analysis.
Pattern recognition.
Reconciling figures that should match and don’t.
This, I can do.
There’s something deeply, unfashionably comforting about a spreadsheet that doesn’t require me to have feelings about it.
The spreadsheet doesn’t care about welcome baskets, or windows, or lamps that remain on.
The spreadsheets have columns and the columns have rules and the rules always apply, which is more than I can say about any other system in my life.
What if I help these people?
Before I can go full Juniper Mercer and create a complete business plan, there’s a musical knock at my door at the same time that my phone rings. Taylor Swift’s “You Belong with Me” blaring from my phone speaker can mean only one thing—Fenway Jones gained access to my phone.
And the irony of the song he chose isn’t lost on me either.
“Fen.”
“Hi, Spite-Berry.” His tone is off, and my hackles are officially raised. “Since you haven’t left your apartment, I figured I’d come over to give you an update. You gonna let me in?”
With the Berry Brigade of Meddlers, it was only a matter of time before one of them found their way over here. Today, I’m glad it’s Fen.
When I open the door, he’s chuckling, and I put down my phone. “Yeah,” he says. “You look about as good as Cole does.”
“Thanks. I think. What’s all that?”
“Don’t say no until you’ve heard me out.” He pushes past me into my kitchen and sets his stuff down on the island. “This is iced coffee with two sugars and a splash of oat milk.”
It feels like a bribe.
“This portfolio…” His nerves show when the muscle in his cheek twitches. “Contains the next two hours of your life. We’re going to write, role play, and record the thing you’ve been putting off.”
“Fen.” Acid floods my stomach, so I set down the coffee.
“I haven’t finished my proposal. This isn’t a press release.
It’s not a statement. It’s whatever you decide it will be, but it’s time for you to tell your story, and I’m here as your friend, your unpaid PR consultant, and the person who’s been sitting in a war room with your brother and our lawyer for way too many hours waiting for you to be ready to rewrite your narrative.
The thing you don’t understand—that all of us see—is that you are ready.
You’ve always been ready. You’ve just been waiting for permission when that permission should’ve always come from you. ”
I reach for my water bottle with a shaky hand. “I don’t have a good track record with posting shit, Fen.”
“We’re not posting anything…yet. First, we’re going to storyboard the fuck out of it, and I won’t let you make a bad decision today.
Then we’re going to record it. After that, I’ll edit the hell out of it like it’s the next Hollywood blockbuster because I come with receipts.
The cost of trying is zero, but the price of doing nothing is too high. ”
He opens the portfolio and then starts taping sheets of paper to my kitchen cabinets.
Under those, he tapes up pages of notes in three different colors of ink.
Grace’s timeline in red. Natalie’s GoFundMe with Cole’s projects written in blue.
Screenshots from my own vlog and social media with notes for each in a vibrant purple.
It all lays out the destruction of my life in a rainbow of truths and lies but leaves out a key detail—my parents.
“When did you do all of this?” I ask, my fingers trailing over a screenshot of a vlog I made when I was sixteen.
It’s frozen on Natalie’s face and the sneer she threw my way right before she said something vile.
When he asked for permission to go through them, I didn’t realize they’d end up as wallpaper.
“Sunday night and most of Monday morning. Hudson annotated my notes behind me, fact checking everything three times. We’ve been waiting for you to invite us in, and you haven’t, so I’m coming at you like the Kool-Aid Man. Sit down.”
I sit. “We’re not discussing what my parents did?” I ask, staring at the storyboard.
He shakes his head. “That might have legal ramifications for you and Cole, so we’re not going to take chances with that until we have to. But trust! Cole, Nolan, and Hudson are being vicious about it.”
There are too many possibilities to fathom.
“That’s their problem to solve, Junie. This is yours.”
Right. I have a job to do too.
“Tell me what you want people to know, Junie. Not what you want to say. What you want them to know. They’re very different things.”
I open my mouth, and he stands, pulling markers from his bag and walking to the first sheet of paper taped on my cabinet.
“I want them to know that I…was wrong.”
He frowns. “Go on.”