Chapter 48
Juniper
One month later
She would kill for an actual cup of espresso, not the decaffeinated garbage she had been drinking since her cardiac arrest.
Finishing her third meeting of the morning, June left the executive conference room and headed down the hall, wishing she
had time to slip off her heels and curl up on the sofa in her office for a few hours. Unfortunately, she had a full slate
of meetings all day. A nap would have to wait.
With a sigh, she turned the corner toward her office and spotted her two assistants chatting with a third person, someone
so unexpected it took several seconds for her brain to register what her eyes were seeing.
“Ali!” she exclaimed as joy rushed through her. “What are you doing here? We just talked a few days ago and you never said
a word about coming to Seattle.”
Her sister gave her an impish grin, looking worlds different from the nervous, timid intern she had once been in these very
halls.
“I wanted it to be a surprise. I wasn’t about to let you celebrate your birthday without bringing you presents. I have some
from Grandma and a few from me.”
She gestured to a basket at the edge of the desk, piled high with beautifully wrapped gifts.
“You should have told us it was your birthday.” Margaret sounded hurt, as if June had purposely withheld the information from
her.
She had never really kept her birthday a secret from anyone, but it hadn’t been a big deal to her in a long time. Without a family to celebrate with her, most of the time her birthday felt like any other day.
“You didn’t need to come all this way,” she said, touched anyway.
“I wanted to. I have two presents you have to open now.”
“Should we go into my office?”
Ali exchanged looks with the two assistants. “No. Let’s do it out here. Open this one first,” she said.
Her staff had been stunned when she had told them the truth upon her return, that the intern they had once believed was incompetent
as an executive trainee was none other than her half sister, who actually had zero interest in the job.
“Yes. Open them,” Jason urged. “You’ll have to wait on a gift from us, since we didn’t know it was your birthday.”
Alison held one out to her and she didn’t see any choice but to take the package from her.
Torn between feeling touched and feeling uncomfortable, she tore away the wrapping to reveal a slim box. When she opened the
box, she discovered a folded piece of paper.
“It’s our DNA test results. They actually came a few weeks ago and I already looked at mine so I know what it says.”
She didn’t need to see the results. Seeing that inscription to her mother at the beginning of Carson’s missing manuscript
had been all the proof she needed.
Still, she looked through the results and saw the laboratory had offered further confirmation. She shared a substantial number
of DNA markers with Alison Wells, too many to be a coincidence. They were close relatives.
“Welcome officially to the family,” Ali said.
June smiled and hugged her again. “Thanks. But I don’t think either one of us had any remaining doubts, did we?”
“I didn’t. But verification is always good, right? I have one more I want you to open now. You can open Grandma’s gifts later. I thought maybe we could do a video call with her when you do.”
June mentally rearranged her afternoon schedule so she could spend the rest of the day with her sister.
“Good idea.”
She opened the second present, while Alison practically vibrated with anticipation.
Inside was a book with a bound leather cover. Her eyes suddenly burned with tears.
“The Forgotten Road,” she exclaimed, reading the cover. “How?”
She had only been gone a month. How had Alison managed to have the book printed in that time?
“Remember I told you I had that friend who hired someone to print copies of her book? I wanted you to have your own copy of
Dad’s book so I ordered a rush job.”
“Oh, Ali. Thank you. It’s beautiful.”
It was more priceless to her than a box overflowing with diamonds. A tear dripped out as she hugged her sister again.
“You’re welcome. I had a dozen copies printed. So far only you, me, Grandma and Beck have them.”
Beck.
Simply hearing his name brought back all the yearning she had been fighting for weeks.
She was in love with him. That truth had become inescapable through all the long hours she had been away.
“Have the two of you decided whether you want to release it on a wider scale?”
“Not yet. We’ve talked about it, but, like I told you, we won’t make that call without you being involved. It was dedicated
to your mother, after all.”
She wasn’t sure she wanted the entire world to read something that felt so intensely personal to her, even though the book
was a completely fictionalized story that likely bore little resemblance to her parents’ actual affair.
Ali shrugged. “Basically, we decided not to decide for now. There’s no rush. We can all kick it around.”
She didn’t want to take part in any discussions. That would involve having to talk to Beck, and she wasn’t sure she had the
strength to do that.
“For now, you have your own copy and you can reread it whenever you like,” Ali said.
“Thank you.”
Her sister suddenly looked sly. “There’s something else. It’s in your office.”
“This is enough,” she protested. “Really. More than enough. I can’t believe you came all this way.”
“I was glad for an excuse, since I might not have the chance to see you again for a few months. Xan and I are leaving next
week for India.”
“Before you get your bar exam results?”
She knew her sister had taken the test the week before, with much angst and worry.
“I won’t get them for at least another month. Why sit around stressing about it when I could be exploring the world with the
man I love?”
As always, Ali glowed when talking about Xander. It warmed June’s heart to see her so happy. She had since watched many of
Xander Scott’s travel videos and had been impressed at his passion and creativity, not to mention his courage and undeniable
charm.
“I think you’re going to want to see what’s in there,” Ali said now.
Her voice held so much significance that June felt a vague sense of trepidation. Warily, she opened her office door and walked
inside, aware of Ali and her two assistants’ odd expressions of anticipation.
A few feet inside the door, she froze, gazing in shock at the narrow wooden table that hadn’t been there when she left her
office earlier.
It was a console table. One of Beck’s, she knew without even looking at the tabletop, the dark wood a contrast to the incandescent blue of the resin that threaded through it like water flowing through a slot canyon.
The tears threatening earlier came back in full force as she tried to register how this was even possible. Had Ali hauled
this whole thing from Bridger Peak? Did Beck know Ali was giving her one of his tables?
She moved closer, aching to trail her hands over the surface.
An instant later, she realized there was someone else in her office. A silent man stood in the shadows between the wide windows
that overlooked the Seattle skyline. He watched her with a fierce expression that seemed to steal all the air from her lungs,
replaced by a mad rush of longing.
“Beck!”
How had she not seen him there at once? Or at least sensed his presence?
“Happy birthday, Juniper.”
She felt lightheaded and for one horrible moment, she was afraid she might pass out.
Oh, she had missed him. She had yearned to reach out to him every single day since leaving Bridger Peak. It was only through
supreme effort that she had been able to refrain from asking Ali about him in their frequent text exchanges and phone conversations.
“How?” she managed. “How did you get this here?”
He stepped closer to her and she wondered how she could have forgotten what he looked like. The strong angle of his jaw, the
sweep of his dark hair, those intense green eyes.
“We drove. The hardest part of the whole journey was finding a damn parking space in downtown Seattle.”
“Why?”
“Because there aren’t enough of them, especially when you’re hauling a trailer.”
“No. Why are you here?”
He took another step toward her and hesitated for a long moment before he spoke. “When I was a prosecutor, I had a hard-earned reputation for my opening and closing arguments. For my fluid prose, my unshakable convictions, my impassioned delivery.”
“I believe it.”
“The whole drive here, I tried to come up with what I would say to you when I saw you again. I played through a hundred different
conversations in my head.”
She might have expected him to offer her some hint of what those internal conversations might have involved. Instead, after
another long pause, he gestured to the table. “Come and take a look.”
She stepped forward and truly looked at the piece of furniture he had created with his own hands.
It was stunning. The most beautiful of his work she had seen yet. The blue resin glowed with life, the wood dramatic and scarred.
“This was a piece of a majestic western larch that was struck by lightning last summer. You can see the scorch marks there.”
She touched the surface with trembling fingers and traced the spidery black marks, so dramatic and evocative of the rugged
mountain landscapes she had come to love.
“Some would consider it damaged beyond repair. It’s not. Look how beautiful it still is.”
Another tear spilled out and then another and she could do nothing to hold them back.
He stepped closer, tracing his thumbs over her cheekbones to brush them away.
“I’m in love with you, June. I know all the reasons you don’t think we can work. I understand them and would never try to discount your feelings or tell you they’re not valid. They are. But I had to try one more time to show you how I feel. To me, you are strong, resilient, beautiful. You have faced tremendous hardship in your life yet are still one of the most caring, giving, courageous people I’ve ever met.”
She wasn’t. She had come to understand that about herself over the past lonely month.
She lived in a constant state of fear. She was afraid of another cardiac arrest. She was afraid of not being able to do her
job adequately, or worse, of not enjoying it anymore.
She was afraid of spending the rest of her life in this numb half state.
She had spent the past month trying to convince herself that pushing him away was the only way to protect him, to protect
herself from the pain of losing him. But now, standing in front of him, she realized how hollow her life had felt without
him. The idea of continuing without Beck by her side suddenly seemed far more terrifying than any uncertainty her heart condition
could bring.
She looked up into his eyes, searching for any sign of doubt, any flicker of hesitation. But all she saw was love—steady,
unwavering. He was here, not because he didn’t understand the risks, but because he did.
And still, he wanted to be with her.
“I don’t want to lose you,” she whispered, her voice barely audible. “But I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to
be... enough.”
Beck’s grip on her tightened just slightly, his forehead resting against hers as he spoke. “You are enough, June. You’ve always
been enough. We don’t have to figure it all out right now. We take it one day at a time.”
For the first time in weeks, a glimmer of hope sparked inside her. She had been so focused on the pain of walking away, she
hadn’t stopped to consider what she could gain by letting Beck in—by letting herself be loved, flaws and all.
Maybe life would be unpredictable, maybe her heart condition would bring challenges neither of them could foresee, but Beck
was right. They could face it together.
Her lips trembled, but a smile broke through the tears. “I’ve missed you,” she confessed, the weight of her self-imposed isolation finally lifting. “I don’t want to push you away anymore.”
A slow smile spread across Beck’s face, the smile she had come to love. “Then don’t,” he murmured before pulling her into
his arms, holding her close as if he could protect her from everything, even the uncertainty of her own heart.
They stood there for a long time, wrapped in each other.
As his mouth lowered to hers, June realized this was the first time in a long while that she didn’t feel consumed by fear.
Instead, she felt steady.
She felt loved.
Her heart wasn’t whole, but it was hers to give, and she was finally ready to do just that.
* * * * *