27. Lights Off #2
Spite would be for me, but this is for Cole because he never should have carried the weight of my pain.
I cross-reference Meridian’s portfolio with Natalie’s name and everything that overlaps from the last six years.
I build a paper trail out of scraps of conversations the way another woman builds a sweater out of yarn.
I spend three hours building a case, which proves easier than I would’ve imagined when I dig back through my old vlog—something I only thought to do because of fucking Natalie—and find the proof I need.
Video evidence of Cole working on the veterans’ memorial. Cole working on a bridge that Meridian debuted last year, naming Natalie as the head architect. And the library, the one Cole designed with light in mind. He created these from his heart, and Natalie destroyed them with hers.
By the time the clock ticks past midnight, I’ve built a file that’s hard to refute. This is what I do. It’s in my pathology. I find holes and document them. I may not always act on them, but I always document them.
And today, I’ve decided to act. Vengeance and heartache make a girl dangerous, and I’m about to become the villain of Natalie’s nightmares.
My shoulders pull away from my ears. My spine unlocks, and my lungs fill with the freshest air.
Everything falls into place once I open my web browser.
I navigate to Meridian’s corporate website and find their Ethics and Compliance contact at the bottom of their About page. Then I click. Just one quick press of my finger, and a pop-up appears.
Then I type.
I attach my file.
I share my proof.
And I pause.
With one more click of a button, everything will change. Again.
The process of hitting Send has the power to create or destroy.
I’ve been on the receiving end of both.
I could choose to close the window, walk away, and go to sleep, secure in the knowledge that Cole will wake up tomorrow to a broken fake engagement to a woman who may or may not be at The Haven in a week.
And Natalie’s career will die at its own pace, on its own schedule, the way careers built on stolen work typically do.
I’ll have done the adult thing.
The mature thing.
The correct thing.
But then I remember who I was. The little girl who lived in the shadows of shitty people’s decisions.
That version of me has been called the poor girl, the charity case, a mistake, and garbage by a woman who broke me down before the real trauma of my life could finish me off.
That version had her notebooks destroyed, her lunch thrown in the trash, her name written on bathroom stalls in permanent marker, her number posted on a dating site for disgusting men when she was only seventeen.
That Juniper Mercer sat out of a decade of social functions because the mere thought of being in a room with Natalie Moore or anyone like her was enough to make hives break out across her skin.
That Junie hid.
This Junie will not.
This Junie just learned that for six years, the man she’s loved for more than half her life has been paying Natalie Moore—with his own work, with the mind I fell in love with at every Mercer Christmas—to keep me safe from the very woman who created me.
Cole’s been paying for Natalie’s silence.
With his art.
For years.
No.
If human metamorphosis is a real thing, I’m about to become a motherfucking phoenix.
I type out the message.
To whom it may concern…
I’m careful. Forensically careful. I don’t editorialize.
I remove all emotion. I don’t call Natalie a thief.
I don’t mention the blackmail because the blackmail isn’t my evidence to deploy—it’s Cole’s.
And whatever happens to me, I won’t be the one who took that from him.
But Natalie has made a career at the expense of my heart, and she’s a threat I’ll readily disarm.
I think about Cole. About his decision to choose Natalie all those years ago. Then I think about tonight, and how he chose her again right in front of me.
I hit send.
The screen loads.
Message Sent.
I stare at the confirmation. I wait for satisfaction, for the rush of it, the I got you, the thing that always lights up my nervous system when I retaliate.
It doesn’t come.
What comes instead is the quiet dropping of my stomach. The overwhelming sense of loss. The total and complete destruction of my heart.
I close my laptop and rest my hands on the lid.
I committed revenge against someone who truly deserves it, but it isn’t delivering the payoff I expected.
It’s just made me tired.
So. Damn. Tired.
But I don’t sleep. I sit, folding in on myself, staring out my dark windows, unable to formulate my next steps.
For the second time in a matter of months, I’m well and truly lost, adrift, alone in a sadness I thought I’d already outrun.
Headlights cut through my space at 2:11 a.m. I don’t move from my spot on the couch, but I see the sleek sedan anyway.
Cole exits alone. His bowtie is gone. His jacket is off. He’s carrying something in his hand.
An award?
I hope he won.
He turns and looks straight up at my window.
He knows I’m sitting here. He can’t see me, but he knows. That connection that ties us together is frayed but not severed. Not yet.
He doesn’t cross the driveway.
He doesn’t call out.
His broad shoulders are drawn. There’s a sadness to him that I never thought he’d show.
Then he sits down on his porch step. The one that’s always one below my spot.
And he doesn’t leave.
He’s keeping his promise. He’s not coming after me—but he’s waiting.
Time moves slowly in sadness.
The clock slides into 2:45, then 4:40, and I realize with a stupid, flooding sensation that he’s going to sit there all night.
He’s keeping his promise as literally as he can.
Goddamn him.
I press his grandmother’s ring to my heart and hold it there, watching the man I’ve loved since before I could drive, and I have no idea how any of us will proceed now that the wall of lies has come crashing down.