7. His Kitchen, My Rules
HIS KITCHEN, MY RULES
JUNIE
Routines, I’m finding out, have a way of forming in The Haven whether you want them to or not.
Every morning now, I enter Cole’s home and make coffee in his kitchen because the machine in my apartment produces something that tastes like mold and his kitchen has the good stuff—a French press, whole beans that wake you up with their scent alone, and a grinder that makes so much noise an aircraft carrier could take off next to me and I wouldn’t hear it.
Do I also enjoy the possibility of waking Cole up before he’s ready? Yes. Yes, I do.
And, every morning, after I’ve made my own cup, I reach into the cabinet to find the hidden decaf coffee I make for Cole.
Today I hold it for a full ten seconds though. Debating. Warring. Cursing myself.
This has always been the plan!
Strategic sabotage to keep him off balance and even the scales a bit. And if I don’t maintain the upper hand, I’ll have to admit that last night…mattered, and quite honestly, I’d rather chew on glass. But the dark circles that have appeared under his eyes haunt me now.
I put the freaking decaf back and grind more of the caffeinated beans. I press brew for an entire pot, then leave his mug untampered with on the counter where he’ll find it after I’m gone.
There’s no need to examine why.
Cole Whittaker is but a bump in my pothole-filled road, nothing more.
With my mug in my hands, I retreat to the conference room before I hear his bedroom door open upstairs. That’s how comfortable I’ve become in this space. I know the click of his bedroom door, and that knowledge is a poison in my veins.
How much more of this can I take?
Heavy footsteps hit the stairs, and I stare straight ahead at my screen because the sight of Cole Whittaker in the gray sweatpants he insists on wearing every goddamn morning just might be the two-handed shove that sends me flailing into the feelings I’m actively attempting to avoid.
Two hours and three cups of coffee later, I’m staring at something that ignites my spiteful ways.
I’ve been inside The Haven’s books for weeks now.
At first, the damage looked like incompetence—misallocated funds, duplicated payments made to look like a clerical error, vendor accounts that don’t match invoices.
All stuff that could technically be considered innocent mistakes by someone who isn’t qualified and is in over their heads.
But incompetence is random. Incompetence doesn’t follow a pattern.
And this? This is a pattern.
Opening another spreadsheet, I begin the tedious process of cross-referencing the vendor payments against the actual contracts to confirm what my gut already knew.
Devin didn’t mismanage The Haven’s finances.
He funneled them. Systematically. Over months.
Small enough to avoid detection, large enough to matter, and now I’m close to having proof—a bank account registered to an LLC I can’t find a physical address for.
Whoever set it up knew what they were doing.
It’s the kind of careful that requires a very good accountant or a very paranoid thief.
I’ve even deep-dived into Cole’s personal accounts because yes, I’m thorough like that.
The only thing out of the ordinary was a very large personal loan that he’s never missed a payment on.
Maybe he bought Nana Mae’s land outright?
Still, I wonder briefly why he took out that type of loan, but because it’s all aboveboard and not connected to his business accounts, I decide to move on.
Not that I expected to find him stealing from himself, but he probably didn’t expect Devin to…
I sit back in my chair and tap my pen against the table. The tap, tap, tap is like a drill to my forehead.
Devin didn’t just steal from Cole—he framed the LLC to look like Cole’s doing. It’s the only thing that makes sense. I just have to find the proof.
It changes Nana Mae’s narrative completely. This isn’t a nephew in over his head. This is someone who looked at a family business, a community of retirees, and saw an opportunity.
Mae’s nephew stole from people with trust so ingrained in their belief system that they never saw it coming.
I pull up the bank routing number again and run it through every public database I can access. It’s another dead end. Then I try cross-referencing the LLC registration against state filings. Still nothing.
Money always leaves a trail. Wherever Devin was funneling money to, he knew how to bury the trail. But I have this thread, and I will pull, and pull, and pull because numbers don’t lie and I’m very good at making them talk.
My phone buzzes with a direct message from Fen, and I grind my teeth.
Fen: Don’t freak out.
Great. My favorite opener from a man whose entire career is built on controlling narratives.
Junie: What now?
Fen: Grace did a podcast. The Unfiltered Hour. It has 2.3 million subscribers.
Fen: Just when your story was beginning to fade, she stepped it up. Again.
The coffee in my stomach threatens to make an appearance in my mouth.
Fen: She’s rebranding. She’s creating a full victim arc and said she’s writing a book about surviving friendship abuse. Her words, not mine.
Fen: Also—and I need you to stay calm here—she showed another video. Of you at the Red Sox game. Obviously edited. And she cried.
Of course it’s edited. I’m sure it doesn’t show the guy grabbing my ass, just my reaction to it. I’m not even surprised she cried—she’s been rehearsing for this moment her entire life.
Junie: How bad is it?
I have a feeling I already know. If you pit me against Grace, I’ll always get the shit end of the deal. Grace is lovable in a way I’ve never been able to manage.
Fen: Her I.Am.Sorry account gained 200K followers overnight. She’s at 750K now.
Fen: But, my little Spite-Berry, this is important here. She’s overplaying her hand. Her timeline doesn’t match up. I’ve got screenshots from three different interviews where her story contradicts itself.
Fen: When she falls, she’ll fall hard.
Fen: DO NOT ENGAGE. Don’t look. Let me handle it.
Fen: In fact, handing your phone over to Cole isn’t the worst idea either.
Junie: I’m not going to engage.
I sit back in my chair with a huff and open a new web browser. Does he truly think I have no self-control?
Fen: Spite-Berry, I love you, but I know you. You’re already googling the podcast, aren’t you?
I close the browser and set my phone face down.
Asshole.
Seven hundred and fifty thousand people. That’s how many humans have chosen Grace’s version of events. Seven hundred and fifty thousand strangers think I’m the villain in the friendship I gave my best to.
Meanwhile, I’m hiding out in a retirement community in South Carolina, untangling someone else’s financial wreckage, making coffee for a man who broke my heart, and slowly realizing that the mess in these spreadsheets goes deeper than anyone in this house wants to admit.
Friendship abuse. For real?
I close my eyes and count to ten. Then I reopen my spreadsheet because numbers don’t lie, and numbers don’t cry on podcasts, and numbers have never once made me feel utterly alone.
Cole appears in the doorway of the conference room with a plate of food I didn’t ask for and sets it on the corner of the table without saying a word. A quick glance at the time tells me I’ve worked through lunch. Again.
The tightness in my throat grows thorns. He made grilled cheese and cut it diagonally, with a pickle on the side I know came from Dollie’s personal stash because that woman is obsessed with the healing properties of pickle juice and makes it herself.
I eye it while he watches me, but I don’t thank him, and he’s not expecting me to. That’s the weird arrangement we’ve silently fallen into. He feeds me, I pretend not to notice, and we both act as though this is normal boss-employee behavior.
We both know it’s not.
“I need to talk to you about the books,” I say, swiping a triangle of the grilled cheese my stomach refuses to let me ignore. I’m not a freaking martyr like him.
He leans against the doorframe and crosses his arms. He’s wearing a baby blue button-down with the sleeves rolled up, showing off his forearms. He probably does that on purpose.
Add in the glasses he’s pushed to the top of his head, the slight scowl tugging his lips down, and he looks like some irritably hot professor who punishes bad girls over the top of his desk.
Er—record scratch and salt in my eyeballs. What the fuck?
“What about them?”
Shit. Focus, Juniper!
“The damage isn’t random. Devin wasn’t incompetent—he was strategic. The money he’s been funneling from The Haven started at least twelve months ago, but I have a feeling that if I keep digging, it’ll go back even further.”
Cole’s face flashes…anger? Regret? It’s fast—there and gone—but it was there. A flicker behind his eyes that looks like the moment before a building collapses.
“Did you find proof?”
I frown. What other kind of proof does he need? “Numbers don’t lie, Cole.”
“Did you find proof?”
Asshole! Does he not believe me? We don’t need proof to know there’s a problem. “Not yet, but I’m getting close.”
“I need irrefutable proof, Juniper,” he snaps. Unlike others, I’ve had years of experience with his bark, so even if it’s never been directly aimed at me before, I don’t react.
“You’ve known about this for months, haven’t you? And you haven’t even filed a police report. I haven’t seen a single contract or a bill for a lawyer—”
“Because I don’t have proof yet, Viper.”
The asshole used my nickname as a defense mechanism.
But I’m not his enemy. Not in this. “My proclivity toward petty has nothing to do with this, Mr. Whittaker. This is the one area of my life where I’m in control.
I’m the professional here. I know what the hell I’m talking about.
And from where I’m sitting, your grandmother’s nephew systematically stole from you, from her, and you’re sitting on it.
This isn’t something you can quietly fix without telling anyone. ”