20. Exit Wounds
EXIT WOUNDS
COLE
There’s a specific kind of quiet that descends on a house after people you care about leave.
Not empty. Empty is neutral. It’s…something else. The silence feels heavier when a house that was full isn’t anymore, and the home knows the difference. I think it’s the way the hush seems to reverberate around every corner and bounce off every door—lonely, and it’s about to happen again.
Fen leaves first because he’s headed to Los Angeles to meet with a client. Fenway Jones treats goodbyes the way he treats arrivals—at volume, with copious amounts of physical contact, and in a way that leaves the room feeling disorganized after he’s gone.
But it’s the hug he gives Junie that grates on my last nerve. Or more accurately, it’s the look he gives me over her head—it says seventeen things, none of which I’m prepared to hear.
Finally, he lets her fucking go.
“You know where I am,” he says with a smirk that’s even more irritating than his voice. “There’s a pause in Grace’s manipulation right now, so we wait. It probably means she’s getting desperate and all we need is one more big lie from her to put all the pieces into play.”
“Fine,” Junie says. Patience isn’t a virtue she comes by naturally, but she’s lasted much longer than any of us thought she would.
Then he places one hand on my shoulder, and his playful expression vanishes. There’s no performance here, just Fen, stripped back to the person underneath his facade of chaos.
He’s letting me know he’s serious. That he’ll be here when I’m ready. When I need him. When my life potentially crashes and burns.
“I know.” It’s the best I can do with the boulder he just shoved down my throat.
He nods, and then he’s gone. The house is already ten frequencies lower.
Hudson leaves an hour after Fen. He pulls me in and claps me on the back hard enough to land like punctuation. “Don’t make me come back here for the wrong reasons.”
Our entire brotherhood knows that things are changing, but no one knows exactly where we’ll all fall after the explosion happens.
“I won’t.”
He holds my gaze, making sure I mean it. Then he loads his rental car and drives through The Haven’s gate while Stanley narrates the departures into his walkie-talkie for the benefit of no one.
Nolan’s the last to leave a couple of hours later—probably by design—and because he and Hud forgot to coordinate flights.
He and Junie have been standing at the bottom of my driveway for close to twenty minutes while I hide on the porch like a fucking stalker.
He glances toward the house, close to where I stand in shadow behind a large column, but before he gets into his car, I step into view.
I’m not sixteen, and we already had our uncomfortable goodbye.
When the car disappears around the corner, Junie remains at the end of the drive for a moment. Not moving. Just…staring off into space. When she eventually turns, I step forward again, expecting to call after her.
But she’s not going to her apartment. She’s coming to me, to my house, and it settles the hornets buzzing around my chest.
Even my pulse tunes to the beat of her the closer she gets.
Junie sits on the top step but doesn’t say anything, so I quietly sit below her—taking our usual spots as though this is how we were created to fit in the world.
“He told me to stop waiting for people to leave,” she says after a lot of deep breaths. “As a general rule and new life philosophy.”
“That sounds like Nolan.” It also sounds like he’s actively pushing her toward me without knowing the landmines I still have in place.
She stomps her foot on the stair next to me. “He also said I should order the thing I actually want at a restaurant instead of ordering something safe and stealing half of whoever’s plate I like better.”
I chuckle, and the lightness it brings overpowers my earlier fears. “That’s been a problem for some people since you were twelve.”
“It’s only a problem for Hudson. It’s actually strategic. Why commit to one entrée when—”
“Junie.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She pulls her knees up. The ocean breeze swirls her hair around her face. “It’s a metaphor.”
I nod, then lean back on my elbows. My arm is an inch from her thighs.
After a while, she angles her legs closer to me, the distance between us evaporating like a morning fog. “What did Hudson say to you? It looked like an…uncomfortable conversation.”
“You want the truth?”
She nods, and I catch the movement from the corner of my eye.
“He said to get my shit together.”
I don’t even have to look her way to know she’s smiling. “He’s succinct.”
“Efficient,” I agree.
The air shifts around us. I can feel her wanting to ask the follow-up question—Are you going to?
Then she pulls back half an inch. She’s decided not to ask, which is its own kind of answer.
She’s trusting me to get there without being pushed into it.
It’s more than I’ve earned and the most terrifying gift I’ve ever been handed.
I can’t let her down. Again.
“I have work to do,” she says, standing. Her bare leg brushes my arm.
There’s a chemical reaction that happens between us that can’t be replicated or denied. The harder I try, the stronger the force of it.
“Me too.”
She goes inside. The door doesn’t slam. And she doesn’t look back.
I sit on the porch for another ten minutes, allowing myself to want something without immediately cataloguing why I don’t deserve it.
It’s harder than it sounds. I’ve been dismantling my own wants for so long I’ve almost forgotten the fabric of them.
Almost.
But like all things Juniper Mercer, I’m drawn to her in inexplicable ways, and I follow her path a short time later.
The house has a different rhythm.
It should feel bigger now—fewer people, fewer voices, less commotion. Instead, it feels like a room after the furniture’s been rearranged. The proportions are the same, everything just lands differently, and you know it’s only a matter of time before you stub your toe on something unexpected.
While my mind focuses on what’s changed, my body drifts closer to my own personal metronome.
She’s at the conference table with a mug in her hand, and across from her, at the place I’ve set up to work just to be near her, is one for me. Steam still rises from the top.
Junie knew I’d follow her.
And at this point, I’m pretty sure I’d follow her to the pits of hell if only she asked.
Sliding into my new workspace, thankful that I took the initiative to finally set up the monitor in here, I lift my coffee to my lips and take a long pull.
Only a month ago, I would have been concerned that she’d put MiraLAX in my coffee. We’ve come so far but still have a cavern between us named Natalie Moore.
“County assessor’s office confirmed the extension,” she says. “We have six more days.”
“Is that enough?”
“It would be if you let me pull the final thread on that LLC Devin set up. It’s all we have left, Cole. It’s our final play.”
Instantly, my body becomes too warm.
“It’s not that I won’t go after him, Junie. It’s that I can’t take the fall when we do. I need everything to be in order for the assessment before we proceed.”
She lifts her gaze to mine. Hers is shrewd and assessing but also carries a warmth she doesn’t offer everyone.
“It is, Cole, and I’ll have the report from the handwriting expert by the end of the week.
She verified that the signatures don’t match.
I’ve followed the threads and restructured the false narrative.
Every misdeed is accounted for. Everything that’s framed to look like your doing, I have documented to prove otherwise.
I need to finish this before we’re hit with another problem. ”
Junie’s competence might be the sexiest thing about her, even if wielding it my way has the potential to be my professional downfall.
But she’s also right. She’s been right since she arrived, and I’ve been managing the timeline like a structural engineer who knows a wall is compromised but keeps adding load to it anyway because the alternative requires a complete recalibration of the system I’ve been operating under for six years.
“Give me until the end of the week,” I say, hoping that in those four days I’ll find some kind of clarity with the Natalie problem—just in case the assessment doesn’t go my way.
Her pen taps once. “End of the week.”
I nod.
“What do you think will change in four days, Cole? Why are you still trying to protect him?”
“Its…not about him.” Not really.
Devin is the first step. Natalie and what happened in Boston is another.
Junie nods. There’s no negotiation, no righteous fury. Just Juniper Mercer, giving me the rope and trusting me not to hang myself with it.
Her faith in me is almost harder to sit with than her anger was.
The invitation has been mocking me from my drafting table for days.
Nana Mae left it there after I refused to acknowledge it downstairs with a hot-pink sticky note that says: You’re going. —Love, Nana Mae.
Not a question. Not a suggestion. A unilateral decision she’s already made on my behalf.
The Meridian Architectural Design Awards.
Sponsored by the firm that has been operating for six years on the scaffolding of my silence.
The sad thing is, I’m confident my design that Nana Mae chose will win. What I can’t predict is what will happen when it does.
I pick up the invitation, feeling the heavy cardstock in my hand, the Meridian logo embossed at the top—their name over my designs, except usually I don’t have to look at it so…directly.
The awards dinner is coming up. The entries have been submitted. Mine among them, thanks to Nana Mae.
I drop the invitation face down on the table.
Then I pick it up again.
“I’ll go with you,” Junie says.
My muscles pull taut, like I’ve been caught in the act of something nefarious. I almost smile, seeing Junie straddle the threshold to my office. She nods toward the invitation. It’s no use hiding it from her now.
“If you want me to.” Her snark is nowhere to be found.