18. Resonance
RESONANCE
COLE
Having Fenway Jones in your house is like releasing a golden retriever into a shop that sells handblown glass.
He’s not exactly destructive, but he does operate at a frequency that rattles everything in the room until it finds its natural resonance, and then he looks around at the vibrating chaos like he’s personally responsible for the harmony.
At least Nolan operates on a frequency closer to mine. He stands in the kitchen with silent amusement, watching Fen’s chaos unfold like a friend who’s spent a lifetime cleaning up his wake.
This is the most normal my house has felt in a long time. Begrudgingly, even I admit it’s because we’ve basically transplanted Junie’s Brookline house here.
My house has never felt like a home because it was missing my family.
Which is why I keep waiting for it to all collapse around me at any moment.
Nolan sighs and puts down his coffee. “You’re still doing it,” he says so quietly that my armor clicks into place.
“Doing what?”
“Holding everything in. Keeping yourself apart from the rest of us. You have to…give a little.”
When I don’t respond, he releases an annoyed grunt that’s typically saved for Junie. The problem is, I don’t exactly know where I stand with Nolan these days. With any of them, really.
This is the consequence of trying to cut everyone out. Something they’ve never allowed, and something I still don’t understand to this day. I don’t know if I would’ve continued to put in the effort these guys have when I’ve so blatantly tried to push them away.
“She slept.” He grunts. “At least she said she did, and the dark circles that were under her eyes last night appear less prominent too.”
I keep my gaze averted. “Good.”
I’m struggling to maintain any semblance of normalcy when everything in me is screaming to make Juniper Mercer mine, knowing that I can’t yet.
“Yeah.” Nolan’s gaze bores into the side of my face, and I’m forced to make eye contact. “It is.”
There’s something underneath the words that I don’t want to excavate this early in the morning, so I refill my coffee, planning to fix the motion sensor on my side gate that’s been blinking since Tuesday.
“Don’t fuck this up too, Cole.” Nolan’s words land at my back, causing a hitch in my step.
I don’t know what he’s talking about. There are just too many fuckups vying for top spot in my head these days—it could be any one of them.
Raising my mug in the air without turning around, I say, “I’m trying.”
It’s as ambiguous as his warning, but it’s 100 percent my truth.
Hudson lands at 12:43.
When I asked why he didn’t arrive with Nolan and Fen, I got a vague answer about helping his sister River’s direct support professional. Helping is not organically part of Hudson’s disposition, so I have a feeling there’s a story there.
I’m crossing the driveway with my toolbox in hand when the door to his rental car opens. The second his gaze hits mine, I have the distinct impression that I’m fucked.
He knows something.
His jaw is set in the way I imagine him during a deposition when he’s already operating four moves ahead of whoever’s across the table, and he’s turned that expression directly on me.
“Cole.” He grips my hand between us while we clap each other on the back in some semblance of an embrace. His handshake is aggressive.
“Hud.” I match his grip.
Eventually he releases me, but not before making a point of staring at the garage apartment, then back at me without saying a word, which is somehow the loudest he’s ever been.
Fen bounds up my driveway from whatever spectacle he’s undoubtedly been participating in and throws an arm around Hudson’s neck with reckless affection that only works because Hudson accepts it from only two people on the planet and Fen is one of them.
It interrupts the tension between us, but doesn’t dissolve it, and Hudson’s frost toward me doesn’t thaw over lunch either. He’s not cold—he’s controlled, which is when Hud is at his most unsettling. There’s no telling where or how he’ll strike, you just know it’s coming.
The longer he and Junie talk, the more I begin to realize that he’s frustrated with me in the way that only people who love you correctly can be—not angry at what I’ve done, but furious by what I haven’t.
That’s fine.
He can get in line.
Junie’s different with them all here, and I’m not sure how to internalize that.
She’s not a different person, just…expanded. She laughs more easily, argues faster, wears less of the armor she keeps in place when it’s just the two of us.
At dinner, she and Fen spend forty-five minutes building an absolutely unhinged theory about whether Grace’s entire redemption arc is a coordinated PR strategy that has everyone’s attention.
“The thing is,” Nolan says, “Grace is benefiting from a parasocial attachment loop. Her audience doesn’t actually know either of you.
They’ve constructed that parasocial relationship with two characters who happen to share your names.
The emotional investment is real for them, but the object of it isn’t. ”
Junie just stares at him with an open mouth. “That’s the most clinical and useless thing you’ve ever said to me, and you once described our mother’s funeral as ‘a necessary ritual of grief.’”
“That’s not—” Nolan blushes hard. “I was in med school—it’s not as though I said that during the actual service.”
She tosses a bread roll that bounces off his shoulder. He catches the second one without breaking eye contact.
“Traitor,” she mutters.
“I’m just saying the algorithm—” Fen snaps his mouth shut when she points at him, then Nolan.
“Traitor, both of you. Clinical and complicit.”
Fen raises his glass. “I prefer strategically adjacent.”
Junie lifts her nose in the air as though her word is final.
Nolan keeps talking, but she’s stopped listening with her whole body.
She’s using just enough of her brain to track when she needs to weigh in, which is a skill she’d perfected by the age of thirteen after years of sitting through her mother’s pointed digs about how Junie’s mere existence had ruined her life.
It’s something that’s obviously now ingrained deep.
I was there when it became part of her. I was there when she realized it was her biggest asset in compartmentalizing her pain.
Nana Mae refills everyone’s glass and catches my eye across the table.
She doesn’t have to say anything. My feelings are written all over my face for anyone who cares to look closely enough, and there’s nothing I can do about it when surrounded by the very people who taught me to let down my walls in the first place.
There’s a knock on the door right before it opens, and Katie walks in. For once, I’m grateful for her pushiness and aggressive cheerfulness as she wedges herself between Fen and Nolan while I clear the table.
Katie’s knack for commandeering a room is also what allows me to slip outside for some air.
Moments later, Hudson appears beside me at the railing.
“She’s looking better,” he says quietly.
“I’m glad.”
The weight of his gaze is as effective as physically pressing against my windpipe to cut off my air supply.
“You look like shit.” He says that as though he expected something different.
“Thanks, Hud.”
“I say that as your friend.” He wraps one hand around the railing. “I know you, Cole. And while I don’t know all the details of what made you leave six years ago, I have a pretty good idea.”
My heart is racing too fast. Hudson can’t be involved in any of this. I don’t know all the legal ramifications of blackmail and coercion, but I won’t be responsible for him being disbarred.
“I also think you’re about two weeks away from doing something about it or pushing her out of your life again, and I don’t have the stomach for the second option. So.” He lifts his glass in a gesture that’s more dare than toast. “Get your shit together.”
Hudson has no idea what he’s asking of me.
And I hate that he’s right.
The house slowly descends into silence.
After Katie and Junie each had two glasses of wine, Stanley arrived in his golf cart to escort Katie back to her place, but not before Hudson told him that a golf cart rideshare for the neighborhood would be an excellent source of income.
Now I’ll wake up to twenty emails from Stanley with a new business plan and twenty more from Marley about proper documentation.
Nana Mae ushers Fen and Hudson toward the family room with promises of a nightcap while I slide into the rocking chair on my porch so I can ensure Junie’s meandering actually leads her back to her apartment and not to the ocean’s edge.
Giddy and content is a good look on her—but not if it’ll put her in any type of danger.
As her stairs illuminate one after another, I sigh in relief just as the chair next to me shifts.
Nolan drops into the rocking chair like a man with something he’s been working up to for a long time. I know that feeling—I live in that particular waiting room.
Nolan’s sigh is heavy. “What’s happening here, Cole?”
My throat is thick as I swallow, but I don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say yet. He has a point to make, and my apology will need to fit whatever crime he’s talking about.
There are so many to choose from.
“I’m just trying to help.” That, at least, will always be true.
“That’s not—Fuck, Cole. I owe you an apology.”
It’s so unexpected that my response lands wrong and hard. “You don’t owe me a fucking thing.”
“I do though.” He leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees. “For my graduation party, and…after.”
Everything that makes me a functioning adult goes on hiatus.
“I was…struggling with everything. So many things were changing at once. We’d just lost Mom.
My dad was, well, fuck. He’s a complication we should have seen coming.
Junie refused to celebrate her birthday because she didn’t think she had anything to celebrate.
I was worried about med school and getting her through life when she wouldn’t even talk to me.
But then she danced with you, and I saw your face, Cole. ”
I make a conscious effort to breathe.