19. A Love Knot
A LOVE KNOT
JUNIE
Here’s the thing about not building walls—it requires a different kind of energy than I’ve ever spent.
Hiding is easy. A reflex. Something I’ve been building the muscle for since that first time my mother forgot to pick me up in kindergarten and I sat on the curb for forty-five minutes deciding there was something wrong with me.
Even after Nolan dragged the red wagon to the school to get me because I was too small to walk all the way home, it was a lesson I never really forgot.
Not hiding though, that feels like holding a breath underwater with no way to release it without sinking.
I’m still in Cole’s T-shirt. When I answered the door last night, I assumed it would be Nolan ensuring I got home safely, and since he saw me sleep in this shirt every night for a year after Cole left, I figured it didn’t matter if he saw it now.
I wasn’t expecting to flaunt my battered heart to the man who caused the damage or for that man to completely undo everything with a single sentence.
Wrapped in his shirt now, I can almost feel his name across my shoulders, his number on my back. It creates the kind of stupid happiness that spreads through my chest—the kind I’ve spent twenty-four years training my body to perceive as a threat.
And after Cole left, I stood in front of my bathroom mirror having a very serious conversation with myself about what to do with all of it.
The only conclusion I came to was: Absolutely nothing yet, so it didn’t matter if I stayed wrapped in cotton that he once wore, enveloped in that stupid happiness for a little longer.
I think that’s enough decisions for a Saturday morning.
Ten minutes later, Fen is up to no good.
Juniper & Her Berries:
Fen: Waffles on.
Fen: Juniper Mercer, get over here.
Fen: Don’t make me send Cole after you.
Having Cole in my space again so soon feels like a dare I’m not ready to take, so I fling his T-shirt over my head. It takes me less than three minutes to get dressed and run down my front steps.
Fen has, in fact, commandeered the waffle iron, but by the state of the mess currently smoking around him, I’d say his confidence is misplaced.
Nolan’s at the island with a large protein shake and appears to be reading medical charts on his laptop, except he doesn’t scroll up or down even once, which I find suspicious, knowing him. He likes to have all the facts before he comes to a conclusion.
Nana Mae is hovering around Hudson at the kitchen table, but it appears she’s just trying to annoy him into participating in life away from the legal documents he has spread out before him.
Cole is at the stove and is the first one to notice me.
His shoulders shift—that specific reorganization of his awareness.
It happens whether we’re fighting or not.
Whether I’ve kissed him or told him to stop knocking on doors.
My presence in his space has always done something to him, and I’ve spent years pretending that isn’t the most significant thing he’s ever shown me.
He turns slowly, as though he’s afraid he’ll spook me, and his gaze instantly lands on my shirt—more specifically, the lack of his shirt. Disappointment flares before he has time to recover, but he hands me a mug of coffee with my favorite oat milk and goes back to his eggs.
I stand next to him at the counter, my back to my brother, while pretending to add sugar to my coffee. The tilt of his lips tells me he’s fully aware of what I’m doing—creating a moment of privacy in a room full of people.
“Morning,” he says. Low. Just loud enough for my ears only.
“Morning.”
It’s the most ordinary exchange we’ve ever had.
Fen, who has the situational awareness of a cat and the subtlety of a foghorn, swivels away from the waffle iron on Cole’s left and grins so broadly my entire body flushes.
“The first one’s done,” Fen announces to the room, using a voice that’s painfully loud for no reason other than to draw attention to himself. Or in this case, to draw attention to me and Cole.
“It’s raw in the middle,” Nana Mae says. “You have to let it cook until it beeps.”
“It’s a stylistic choice.”
“It’s salmonella waiting to happen.”
Glancing over my shoulder, I catch Nolan’s mouth twitching over the top of his laptop. But it’s Hudson whose attention is evenly dispersed between me and Cole.
My spine straightens, and I carry my mug to sit at the far end of the island and try to remember how to behave normally in a room full of people who love me.
It’s harder than it sounds because my instinct is still to catalog the exits, the retaliations, the weapons I can organize and use to protect myself with but am trying not to.
“Eat up,” Nana Mae says, patting my arm on her way by. “We leave for the farmer’s market at 9:30.”
She uses the same energy on me that she used on Cole when she told him she’d entered him into the competition to finally beat Paula Van Holten—cheerfully, without asking, and in a way that makes refusal feel like an unsolvable equation.
“Katie’s meeting us there,” she says, handing me a tote bag with a rope shaped like a heart on it. “You’ll carry this.”
My appetite is gone, so I hold up the bag. “What’s the rope for?”
“Decoration. Mostly. Finish up,” she says. “I’ll meet you outside.”
Nolan chuckles, drawing my attention. He instantly holds up his hands in surrender when I scowl at him. “Don’t mind us. Nana Mae gave us all jobs today too.”
“Come on,” Cole says, cutting the weird tension that’s fallen over the room. “I’ll get you the…stuff you’ll need for the market.”
He grabs a hoodie off the hook by the door, then walks me to the end of his driveway in silence.
“I don’t need anything, do I?”
Cole shrugs as though he can’t quite admit out loud that he just wanted five minutes of my time. “Don’t let Nana Mae buy the preserves from the third stall. They’re overpriced, and she’s been arguing with that vendor for three years and always ends up buying them anyway.”
I frown at him.
He stares back, but there are a million untold stories behind his eyes.
“Okay,” I say. “Is…that it?”
He glances over my shoulder, then jerks his head to the side before hitching at the waist to bring his mouth too close to my ear. “No, but Nana Mae’s watching and there’s too much still between us to say more with an audience. Just…don’t run, okay? Not yet.”
An unidentifiable sensation fills my chest. It’s not warm, it’s not cold, it just…is…sitting there, making me slightly uncomfortable.
“I may run from my feelings, Cole, but you’re the only one who has ever truly run, so perhaps you should be taking your own advice.”
Plus, telling me he has something to tell me without actually telling me is just fucking annoying.
And childish.
His shoulders pinch up toward his ears before he quickly corrects course.
His gaze sweeps over my face, studying me as though he can pull all my secrets into his orbit, but that’s not how this works.
“True, Viper. I’m working on it.” He thrusts his hoodie into my hands, then takes a step back and waves at Nana Mae. Cole stares at the clear blue sky, then shrugs. “Might get chilly when the sun goes behind the clouds.” Then he turns on his heel and stalks back to his home.
Nana Mae clucks her tongue as I shove my arms and head through his hoodie. I only inhale the scent of him once.
Twice.
But who’s really counting?
Nana Mae says nothing at all as she drags me toward the market. She doesn’t have to. Her silence says a million things I don’t want to hear anyway.
The Porchlight Cove Farmer’s Market is exactly what you’d expect from a town whose welcome sign would’ve been rejected by Heartmark. Local honey and sea glass jewelry and a man selling hand-thrown pottery that Katie describes as “spiritually overpriced but aesthetically worth it.”
I’m still not sure why Katie thinks it’s such a good idea for us to be friends. As far as I can tell, we have nothing in common except for our love of rosé.
Flanked on either side by Katie and Nana Mae, I carry the rope-heart tote and try not to look like I’m enjoying myself.
I am, obviously, enjoying myself. That’s the problem with this place. It keeps sneaking up on me in ways I can’t protect myself from.
“You’re not turning it anymore,” Nana Mae says at the flower stall that smells like heaven.
I follow her gaze to my left hand that now feels as though it weighs a hundred pounds.
At some point between contemplating cutting off my finger and now, the ring has migrated from diamond facing inward—my system, my hiding mechanism, my way of pretending the entire freaking situation was temporary and contained—to just…
wearing it. Diamond out. Like someone proudly engaged and happy to show it off.
I don’t know when I stopped turning it, or why I don’t remove it, or what in the fresh hell any of it means—it just feels important that I wear it. So I do.
“Nana Mae,” I say with a long-suffering groan that she pays no mind to.
She studies me for a moment. “You like sweet peas, if I remember correctly.”
My hand lands on my hip, but I don’t disagree. That detail could’ve only come from Cole.
“We need sweet peas.” She points to a bucket of them. “For the kitchen table. Cole never thinks to buy flowers for the kitchen table. It’s his one design flaw, but I’ll drill it into him eventually.”
She’s changing the subject, and she does it with such grace that I almost miss it. She’s playing chess while I’m stuck on checkers.
Katie and Nana Mae bicker about…something. I zone out after the flower stall. But as I always do, I keep one ear in the conversation while my mind drifts.
So when Nana Mae curses under her breath, I slowly spin toward her.
Paula Van Holten stands with the posture of a woman who’s been winning at life for a very long time and knows it. But when her gaze falls to me, her persona falters for the briefest moment.
Interesting that she would find me, of all people, a threat. But that’s exactly what her body language indicates.