Chapter 16
The Article
June
The morning started perfectly, which should have been June’s first warning.
She woke to sunlight streaming through her windows and the smell of coffee in the air—Melissa must have gotten up early.
The past week had been a kind of suspended bliss, the two of them finding stolen moments between Lila’s activities and Melissa’s work calls.
Soft kisses in the kitchen. Hands brushing under the table at dinner.
The quiet intimacy of falling asleep on the couch together after Lila went to bed, then reluctantly separating to their own rooms before morning. It wasn’t enough. It was everything.
June stretched, smiled at the ceiling, and reached for her phone to check the time.
Seventeen text messages. Four missed calls. Three voicemails. Her stomach dropped.
The first text was from Tyler:
June. Call me. Now.
The second was from her mother:
Sweetheart, are you okay? We saw the article. Call us.
The third was a link. Just a link, no comment, from a number she didn’t recognize.
June’s hands were shaking as she clicked it.
Senator Brandt’s Unconventional Summer: Questions Swirl About Live-In Nanny Arrangement
The headline hit her like a tidal wave crashing down on her, cold and unrelenting. She scrolled down, reading faster than she could process, catching phrases that seared themselves into her brain.
…sources close to the family describe an unusually intimate relationship...
…the twenty-three-year-old nanny, whose name we are withholding...
…questions about Senator Brandt’s judgment come at a crucial time for her struggling infrastructure bill...
…divorced two years ago amid rumors of personal instability...
…some observers wonder whether the senator’s focus is where it should be...
There was a photo. Melissa at some political event, looking polished and composed, every inch Senator Brandt.
And next to it, a second photo—grainy, clearly taken from a distance—of Melissa and June and Lila at the Fourth of July festival.
The three of them on a blanket, watching fireworks. Looking like a family.
June stared at it. She remembered that evening all too well—the warmth of Melissa’s shoulder against hers, Lila drowsy between them, the sky exploding overhead.
Someone had been watching. Someone had been there with a camera while June thought they were just three people at a fireworks show, and now that moment was evidence. Now it was a headline.
Everyone in Redwood Hollow can guess.
June set down the phone. Picked it up again. Set it down.
Her bedroom door opened.
“June, good, you’re up.” Melissa stood in the doorway, still in her robe, her face pale. “I need to talk to you.”
“I saw it.”
A pause, perhaps Melissa recalibrating that she didn’t have to break the news.
“I’m so sorry,” she said instead. “I don’t know how they—I don’t know who—” Melissa’s voice cracked. “David called twenty minutes ago. It’s everywhere. Not just the gossip sites anymore. The Herald picked it up. There’s going to be questions, and press, and—”
“My name isn’t in it.”
“Not yet. But—”
“It’ll come out.” June heard her own voice as if from a distance, calm and flat. “They’ll find me, and my family, and everyone will know.”
Melissa crossed the room and sat on the edge of June’s bed, close but not touching. “I’m going to fix this. I’m going to find out who leaked, and I’m going to—”
“Going to what? Make it go away?” June laughed, and it came out sharp and brittle. “You can’t make this go away, Melissa. It’s out there. People are reading it right now, making assumptions, judging—”
All the reasons Melissa hadn’t wanted them to go out in public. This was why.
“Let them judge me,” Melissa said. “I don’t care what they say about me.”
“Yes, you do.”
She might act cold and indifferent, but June knew Melissa cared. “I—”
“You care that they’re calling you unstable,” June said. “And I care about that. They’re using me—using us—to hurt your career. Everything you’ve worked for is falling apart because of—”
“Because of what?”
“Because of me.”
“No.” Melissa grabbed her hands, held them tight. “This isn’t because of you. This is because there are people who want to destroy me, and they’ll use anything they can find. If it wasn’t you, it would be something else.”
“But it is me. I’m the weapon they’re using.” June pulled her hands away. “I need to get dressed. Lila will be awake soon.”
“June—”
“We can talk later. Right now, I need to… I’ve gotta process. I just woke up, I need to wake up before I can think.”
Melissa looked like she wanted to argue, but something in June’s expression stopped her. She nodded slowly and left, closing the door behind her.
June sat very still for a long moment. Then she picked up her phone and called her mother.
“I knew it.” Gary Hollis’s voice was flat with something that might have been anger or vindication or both. “I knew something was going on.”
“Dad—”
“Don’t ‘Dad’ me. I read the article, June. ‘Unusually intimate relationship.’ What does that mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything. It’s gossip.”
“Is it?” Her father’s voice sharpened. “Because your mother’s been saying for weeks that something was different about you. That you sounded distracted. Happy in a way that didn’t make sense for someone just working a summer job.”
June pressed the phone harder against her ear.
She walked over to the window, looking out over the backyard.
In the distance, she saw some of the sunflowers they’d planted sway in the morning breeze.
The same sunflowers she and Lila had put in the ground together, full of hope, back when summer still felt simple.
“Has she done something to you?” Gary continued. “Pressured you?”
“What? No. Dad, no, it’s not like that.”
“Then what is it like? Because from where I’m sitting, it looks like a powerful woman taking advantage of a young girl who works for her.”
“I’m not a girl. I’m twenty-three years old.”
“You’re my daughter. And she’s forty-two. Old enough to know better. Old enough to know that this kind of thing destroys reputations and—”
“She didn’t do anything to me.” June’s voice was rising now, the careful calm cracking. “It’s mutual, Dad. It’s not what they’re saying in that article.”
Silence on the line.
“So there is something,” Gary said finally. “Between you and the senator.”
June closed her eyes. “Yes.”
The word landed like a stone. She could hear her father breathing, processing, deciding what to do with it. All the things she hadn’t said all summer. All the lying by omission that had felt like self-protection and now felt like cowardice.
“I need to talk to your mother.” His voice had gone quiet in a way that was worse than anger. “Don’t go anywhere.”
The line went dead.
June stood in the garden, phone clutched in her hand, and thought: he trusted you, and you lied to him all summer, and now he knows, and there’s nothing you can do about that now. The sunflowers moved in the breeze, indifferent and tall, almost ready to bloom.
She stayed in her room until she could breathe steadily. Then she went downstairs to make Lila’s breakfast.
They went to the library that afternoon because June couldn’t stand to stay in the house, and it was a mistake.
The whispers started the moment they walked in. Nothing overt—just glances, murmured conversations that stopped when June got too close, the silence of people who had been talking about you and didn’t want to be caught.
“Miss Hollis?” Lila tugged at her hand. “Why are those ladies looking at us?”
“They’re not looking at us, sweetheart.”
“Yes they are. They keep staring and then looking away.”
June forced a smile. “Sometimes people are just curious.”
At the checkout desk, Mrs. Okonkwo—who had been warm and friendly every other time June had come in—barely met her eyes. And before June and Lila left, she quietly pushed a pamphlet across the desk.
Help if you’re in an abusive relationship.
June stared at it. Then at Mrs. Okonkwo. Then she took Lila by the hand and walked out, leaving the pamphlet on the counter, her heart beating too fast and her face carefully neutral because Lila was watching.
Lila was quiet on the walk home, her hand tight in June’s. Halfway down Maple Street, she asked: “Did something bad happen?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Everyone’s acting weird. And Mom was upset this morning. She was on the phone a lot, and she had her serious voice on.” Lila looked up with those grey-blue eyes. “Is it about the article?”
June stopped walking. “You know about the article?”
“I heard Mom talking to David. She said there was an article and it was bad and she needed to fix it.” Lila’s voice was very small. “Is it about me? Did I do something wrong?”
“Oh, sweetheart. No.” June crouched down, taking both her hands. “You didn’t do anything wrong. None of this is your fault.”
“Then whose fault is it?”
June had no answer. She looked at Lila’s face—seven years old, worried, already so practiced at absorbing adult tension—and felt the unanswered question settle into her chest like something she’d be carrying for a long time.
Her mother called at four.
“Your father is upset,” Laura said. “He’s not angry at you—he’s scared. He doesn’t know how to process this.”
“Process what, exactly? That I’m in a relationship with a woman? That she’s a politician? That she’s older?”
“All of the above.” Laura sighed. “June, honey, you have to see how this looks. From the outside, it’s like—”
“Like she’s taking advantage of me. I know. Dad said.”
“He said that because he remembers what you were like when you came home from Portland. How broken you were.” A pause. “Another older woman in a position of power. Another relationship that started in a professional context. Another situation where you’re the vulnerable one.”
“This isn’t the same thing.”