32. Broken Hearts
brOKEN HEARTS
COLE
I stand on my front porch, numb, while my heart bleeds at Junie’s feet.
I was too late to fix it.
She asked Fen to gather us all here. Hudson and Nolan flank me, probably to hold me back if I go after her.
Because I will. And everyone here knows it.
“I’m sorry,” she says. She’s speaking to us all, but her focus is entirely on me.
“Where will you go?” Nolan asks. His words are gruff when he’s upset.
“I just…” Her piercing blue eyes cut straight to the core of me. “I have some ghosts to chase before I can be whole. Before…I can make any decisions. About anything.”
“Are you coming back?” My words are so soft I’m not sure she can hear me from twenty feet away.
“I—” She breaks eye contact for the first time since she came to stand in front of me five minutes ago. “This is my family. I don’t know how I’ll fit yet, but I’ll come back. I just…can’t make any promises about who I’ll be when I do.”
I have no right to ask anything of her. But I do it anyway. “But you will come back?”
“I…will.” The fingers of her right hand tug on the engagement ring.
“Don’t.” The word cracks and shifts in the air like it can’t find the right tone. “Don’t do that. Not yet.”
She clasps her hands together tightly, then turns on her heel, climbs into her car, and drives away with every piece of my soul that matters.
My drafting table has my forehead imprint on it, and the lamp next to it has been on for so many hours it’s probably becoming a fire hazard.
Nolan clears his throat in my doorway, and I lift my head. He’s wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt that looks like mine. I forgot what it was like living with all these guys. Nothing is off-limits.
He enters my domain looking like he isn’t sleeping much better than I am.
We’re both feeling the effects of Junie’s departure.
“Mae wants us all downstairs in fifteen minutes. She’s on her way over,” he says. “The article drops at eight, and Fen’s been up all night editing Junie’s video. He scheduled it to go live at 8:15. We’re going to watch it together.”
My erratic heartbeat causes another fissure between my ribs.
“Okay,” I say.
“She made it to Boston.”
I nod because I’ve been attached to the Juniper & Her Berries group chat since she left.
“I’ll put some coffee on. It’ll help.” He looks me over again. “And I’ll add some protein powder to it.”
I barely contain my cringe. Juniper would never desecrate coffee that way.
He pauses at the door. “Cole?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t agree with how you went about things, but…thank you. For always looking out for Junie…and for the rest of us.”
“You’re my family.”
“And you’re ours. But…”
I tense, waiting for the hit.
“What comes next will be hard. For all of us. And you need to prepare yourself. The article isn’t the hard part.”
“What is?”
He shakes his head. “You’ll see.”
I hear his feet on every step, and I follow his path to my family room with dread weighing me down.
Nana Mae is fluttering around the space, placing scones, cinnamon rolls, and breakfast sandwiches anywhere she can find room. It’s what she does when she’s nervous—she stress-bakes and flutters when something’s bothering her.
Hudson sits in the center of the couch with his laptop open in front of him and a yellow legal pad beside it.
Fen sits next to him, close enough to annoy him but not close enough to touch.
He’s holding an iPad in one hand, watching three things at once like a child who just discovered cartoons.
Nolan stands against the back wall with his arms folded across his chest, not making eye contact with anyone.
Nana Mae spots me first. “Sit,” she says, then points at the open space next to Hudson.
It’s as if we’re fifteen again and she’s scolding us for sneaking out on Papa’s boat in the middle of the night when we visited him during spring break. That was a mistake we only made once. I’d never seen her so mad.
Without a word, I take my seat next to Hud.
“Someone tossed us a Hail Mary,” Hud says once I’m seated.
“Tommy’s made some enemies at PC Trust, so when they heard there was a warrant coming, one of them pulled every hard copy she could find and even highlighted everything she thought was suspicious.
I skimmed them, and even a quick look indicates that Junie’s house wasn’t the first time he benefited from a shady loan. ”
Fucking Tommy. Hudson’s right. I should have done much more than knock out a couple of his teeth.
“This woman reached out to me quietly. I won’t gain access to any of it officially until the warrant is submitted. But she also did me a favor and looked into the loan you obtained to buy out the original one.”
“Hud, don’t do anything that can get you disbarred.” That’s exactly why I didn’t go to him in the first place.
“Have some faith,” he grumbles. “The good news is, Tommy does appear to have kept everything about your loan aboveboard. That means, regardless of what he told you, you didn’t do anything illegal. That doesn’t mean it’s right—you should’ve still come to us—but it wasn’t illegal.”
I’ve spent so many years worried that I wouldn’t be able to protect Junie that I had no idea some small piece of me was also worried that I would be implicated in her parents’ fraudulent schemes. The relief nearly knocks me over.
“Hudson?” Nana Mae says.
“Eight on the dot.” His eyes haven’t left the clock on his screen. “ArchDaily refreshes on the hour. The Architect’s News is two minutes after.” It doesn’t stop him from obsessively refreshing his screen.
The TV mounted above the fireplace is turned on but holds the Apple emblem idle on the screen. Fen must be planning to stream Junie’s video so we can watch it unfold life-sized.
At eight, Hudson’s screen refreshes, and he pushes his laptop to the center of the coffee table so we can all see it. The headline is clean. Direct.
“Architects at War.”
The subtitle is less flashy, but just as direct.
“Architect Cole Whittaker Files AIA Ethics Report Naming Himself as Author of ‘The Whisper of Souls Memorial’ and Two Other Projects Credited to Meridian’s Natalie Moore.”
Hudson slowly scrolls as we all read. The article is six pages long. It doesn’t name Marcus or the blackmail. It simply states public records as fact. I read it once, the way you’d read your own obituary if it had accidentally run early.
Nana Mae huffs. A small, satisfied sound. “Good. That’s that.”
“That,” Fen says, looking up from his iPad with an expression I don’t like, “is not all.”
Every head in the room turns to him slowly as he presses some buttons on his iPad, and my TV freezes on a recent image of Junie.
I might actually be sick. She looks sad. And so fucking lost. All I want to do is fix her.
“It’s live,” Fen whispers.
“This is going to be fucking brutal.” Hudson curses.
Nana Mae doesn’t even scold him for the swear because her gaze is locked on Junie too. Every person in this room loves her.
“Be warned,” Fen says. “She sent it to me last night. I cleaned up the audio, and timed the b-roll, dropping it in the queue. It’s going to—” His gaze lands on mine. “It’s going to hurt to watch it.”
You could hear a pin drop as Fen presses play.
Junie’s sitting in her apartment with her hair piled in a messy way on her head.
It’s how she looks when she thinks no one’s watching.
This—the real Junie—is who she’s presenting to the world, and it chokes the life out of me.
She’s wearing no makeup. She’s not using a filter.
She hasn’t done a single thing to look ready for the camera.
Then she looks straight into the lens, and it’s as though she’s staring straight into my heart.
“My name is Juniper Mercer,” she begins. “You know me as the villain in many tales, but we all know every good story has three converging points. You’ve heard theirs. Now I’ll tell you mine. Then you can decide the truth.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Nana Mae says.
Hudson sets down his pen.
“I lost my mom when I was sixteen years old. We had a complicated relationship, but it was ours. At twenty-four, I now understand that she loved me the only way she knew how—with timelines, requirements, expectations, and limits. But she was my mom, and I witnessed her die slowly over the course of three years.”
“Fuck.” Nolan drops down beside me.
“I bore the brunt of her sadness. Her pain. Her anger. I took the verbal hits and called them hugs. I took her rants and called it love. Because that’s what good girls do. Right?
“When she finally died, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. I no longer had to witness her pain. I no longer had to carry her scars.”
I ball my hands into fists so tightly that the blood flow constricts.
She took the hits and renamed them hugs. She was sixteen! Sixteen and sitting in the same kitchen with me, and I didn’t know how bad it was—with her mother, with Natalie. I didn’t see it. I thought I was witnessing her grief, but I was really watching her survive.
Nana Mae releases a broken sob and doesn’t apologize for it.
Fen, Hudson, Nolan, and I all hold our collective breath. This is a failure for us all. But I was closest to her. I should have known. I should have seen.
“At sixteen, I didn’t know what to do with these inconvenient truths. I didn’t have any friends. I had a bully who made sure of it. Natalie has always moved in shadows.”
The sound that escapes my lips is more animal than human, and Nolan presses his hand to my shoulder. Solidarity.
“But I had my brother and his best friends. They took care of me and shepherded me the best way they knew how. My brother mostly kept his protective big brother persona. One of his friends became the enforcer—he made sure I didn’t color too far out of the lines.
One friend became my biggest cheerleader—he instilled questionable amounts of self-confidence in a girl who had never been shown her worth.
The other guy, well, he became my best friend.
My confidant. My first love even before I knew what love truly felt like. ”
The room falls into a stillness only known in death.