Chapter 18
Intervention
June
The Hollis kitchen looked the same as it always had—mismatched mugs, faded wallpaper, the worn patch of linoleum in front of the sink—but June felt like a stranger in it.
She stood at the counter, kneading bread dough for the third time that week, and tried to remember why she’d ever thought staying in Redwood Hollow was a good idea.
Because no matter how far I run, I’m still me.
She punched the dough harder than necessary.
Eight days. Eight days since she’d walked out of the Brandt house with a bag over her shoulder and her heart in pieces.
Eight days of sleeping in her childhood bedroom, staring at the Howl’s Moving Castle poster, wondering how she’d ended up right back where she started.
The ambushes were the worst part—not the big obvious grief but the small specific ones.
The smell of coffee in the morning that wasn’t Melissa’s kitchen.
The sound of the neighbor’s kid outside that wasn’t Lila’s voice.
Waking up in the night and reaching for warmth that wasn’t there.
And underneath everything, looping quietly, Lila’s voice from that first Saturday on the couch: you’re good at hair things.
Such a small thing. June hadn’t known, then, how much she’d needed to be told she was good at something.
Her phone sat on the counter, silent. Melissa hadn’t called. Hadn’t texted. June told herself that was what she wanted—space, distance, time to think clearly.
She’d told herself a lot of things over the past eight days.
The silence felt like an answer anyway. Like Melissa had weighed everything up and reached a conclusion and was now on the other side of it, moving forward, doing the senator thing, and June was just—a chapter that had closed.
Stop it, she told herself. You don’t know that.
But she didn’t know anything else either, and the not-knowing was its own misery.
“You’re going to murder that bread.”
June looked up. Her mother stood in the doorway, coffee cup in hand, watching her with the careful expression she’d been wearing since June came home.
“It needs more kneading.”
“It needs to rest. So do you.” Laura crossed to the counter and gently took the dough from June’s hands, covering it with a clean towel. “Sweetheart. You can’t bake your way out of this.”
“I can try.”
“June.”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Mom.”
“I know you don’t. But you’ve made four loaves of bread, two batches of cookies, and something with so much chocolate I’m concerned for my arteries.” Laura leaned against the counter, her eyes soft. “You loved her, didn’t you?”
The question landed like a blow. June had been avoiding that word—love—as if not saying it could make it less true.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters.”
“She chose her career. Her reputation. Her image.” June heard the bitterness in her own voice and hated it. “I was never going to compete with that.”
“Maybe not. But that doesn’t mean what you felt wasn’t real.”
June closed her eyes. She could still see Melissa’s face that last morning—pale, desperate, reaching for her. Could still hear her voice: I’m trying to protect you.
But who’s protecting me from you?
“I should have known better,” June said quietly. “Dad warned me. You both did.”
“That’s not what I said.” Laura’s voice was gentle but firm. “I said to be careful. I never said she couldn’t love you.”
“She didn’t love me. If she did, she would have—” June stopped.
“Would have what?”
June stared at the covered dough. “She would have chosen me. Even once. Even just once, in public, she would have chosen me instead of the other thing.”
Laura was quiet for a moment. “I’m not defending what she did. But I’m also not going to pretend it’s simple. Nothing about this is simple.”
June didn’t have an answer for that. She just stood there, flour on her hands, aching in ways she didn’t know how to name.
She went to the Brandt house on Tuesday.
It was stupid. She knew it was stupid even as she pulled into the driveway, even as she walked up the front path, even as she rang the doorbell and waited with her heart pounding.
Melissa’s car wasn’t there, but that was expected, and wanted. This wasn’t about Melissa.
This was about Lila.
She waited on the porch while the new nanny went to find her, and she looked at the sunflowers she and Lila had planted together along the back fence, now visible around the side of the house.
They’d grown taller than June had expected, taller than Lila, almost as tall as her—fat green stems with heads just beginning to tip toward yellow.
They’d planted them thinking they might not bloom before summer ended.
They were going to bloom. June had no idea if she’d be here to see it.
Footsteps inside. Then Lila appeared in the doorway.
She looked different. Smaller, somehow. Closed off. Her face, when she saw June, didn’t light up the way it used to.
“Hi, sweetheart,” June said softly. “I wanted to see how you were doing.”
Lila didn’t move from the doorway. “I’m fine.”
“I miss you. I’ve been thinking about you every day.”
“Then why did you leave?”
The question was expected, but it still hit hard. “I—things got complicated, and—”
“You promised.” Lila’s voice was flat, but her eyes were bright with unshed tears. “You promised you’d always tell me the truth. You promised you weren’t going to leave like everyone else.”
“Lila—”
“But you did. You left, just like Daddy, just like everyone.” Lila’s small hands were clenched at her sides. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
“Please, sweetheart. If you’d just let me explain—”
“I don’t want you to explain. I want you to go away.”
The door closed in June’s face.
June stood there for a long moment, staring at the wood, listening to the sound of small footsteps retreating inside.
She’d thought—she didn’t know what she’d thought.
That Lila would soften when she saw her.
That being there in person would count for something.
She’d known it might go like this and she’d come anyway, and now she was standing on the porch of a house that wasn’t hers anymore, next to sunflowers she’d planted with a child who had just told her to go away, feeling every bit as stupid as she’d known she might feel.
She turned and walked back to her car. Got in. Drove home with tears streaming down her face and Lila’s voice in her head—you’re good at hair things.
“She’ll come around,” Tyler said that night, sprawled on her bedroom floor while June sat on the bed, hugging a pillow. “Kids are resilient.”
“You didn’t see her face.”
“She’s hurt. She’s allowed to be hurt. But she loves you, and that doesn’t just disappear because she’s angry.”
“It felt pretty disappeared.”
Tyler sighed. “You know what your problem is? You give up too easily.”
“Excuse me?”
“With Ember, with the restaurant stuff, now with this.” He held up a hand before she could protest. “I’m not saying you were wrong to leave Ember.
But you have a pattern, June. You have something you want, and when things get hard, you run, and then you convince yourself that running was the only option. ”
“What was I supposed to do? Stay and watch Melissa deny me on television?”
“No. But you could have pushed harder before it got to that point. You could have made her choose instead of making the choice for her.”
“I did tell her,” June said, her voice sharpening.
“I told her from the beginning. I said I can’t be someone’s secret.
I can’t be an experiment. She promised me I wasn’t.
” She heard herself getting louder and made herself stop.
“I asked for what I needed, Tyler. She agreed and then didn’t follow through.
That’s not the same as me not speaking up. ”
Tyler was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was more careful. “Okay. Fair. So she promised and then didn’t come through. And then you left.”
“Yes.”
“Without giving her a chance to choose differently.”
“She has chosen. She chose on live television.”
“She chose under pressure in a crisis. That’s not the same as a real choice.
” Tyler met her eyes. “I’m not saying she was right.
I’m saying—did you ever tell her what it would look like?
What choosing you would actually mean to you?
Not just that you didn’t want to be a secret, but what the alternative was?
What you needed to believe this was real? ”
June opened her mouth. Closed it.
“I knew Dad would freak,” she said finally. “That everyone would freak out about us. I kept it from all of you, because I get what it looks like.”
“Yeah. And Melissa kept it from everyone, because she doesn’t just have family, she has constituents and all that.” Tyler’s voice was gentle now, not pushing. “Again, not saying she’s right, but maybe you both built walls and then got surprised when the other person couldn’t see through them.”
June stared at the ceiling. The thing was—he wasn’t wrong. She could see that it wasn’t wrong, even while part of her wanted to argue. She’d told Melissa what she didn’t want. She wasn’t sure she’d ever clearly said what she did.
“Stop sounding like a grownup,” she said finally. “It’s freaky.”
He grinned. She threw the pillow at him.
Her phone rang at nine o’clock. Her heart rate picked up with hope, but the name on the screen was Rachel Carter.
“June? Hi, it’s Rachel.”
“Hi.” June kept her voice neutral. “Why are you calling?”
“Because someone needs to, and Mel is too proud to do it herself.” Rachel’s voice was brisk, no-nonsense. “The final hearing on the infrastructure bill is Thursday. Ten a.m., at the capitol building in Salem.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I think you should be there.”
June laughed, brittle and sharp. “Why would I want to watch her give another speech about her commitment to public service?”
“Because this isn’t going to be that kind of speech.
” Rachel paused. “I can’t tell you what’s going to happen.
But I know Mel, and I know she’s been doing a lot of thinking this past week.
If you want to know whether she’s really changed—whether she’s capable of being the person you need her to be—you should be there to see it for yourself. ”
“And if she hasn’t changed? If it’s just more of the same?”
“Then at least you’ll know. And you can move on.” Another pause. “But June, I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen.”
June was quiet for a long moment. She thought about what Tyler had said. About walls and real choices and what it would mean to give someone the chance to choose differently.
She thought about Lila’s face in the doorway. You left, just like everyone.
She thought: why should I be the one to show up for her, when she didn’t show up for me?
And then she thought about all the ways she’d failed to show up too. Not just in the last week. All summer.
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
“That’s all I’m asking.” Rachel’s voice softened. “For what it’s worth… the way she looks at you is different from anything I’ve seen before, even when she was with Michael. That’s not nothing.”
The line went dead.
June lay in the dark for a long time. Then she reached for her phone and set an alarm for six-thirty—early enough to drive to Salem, early enough to be there by nine-thirty—and put it face-down on the nightstand.
She lay there listening to the quiet house settle around her, and thought about sunflowers planted in hope, and a child who asked for waterfall braids, and a woman who had never once been told she was enough until someone showed up and said it without being asked.
She thought: maybe showing up is the whole point.
She didn’t sleep for a long time. But in the morning, she got up when the alarm went off.