Chapter Twenty-Four
Juniper
“What’s this now?”
I turn to see Cara standing at the entrance to the kitchen, holding up her phone.
My world screeches to a halt. A minute ago, I hatched a solid plan with Evvie—I’d pull Cara aside, we’d sit in her childhood bedroom, and I’d be honest with her. She’d have questions, which I’d already prepared responses to, and she might be understandably upset. But I held onto the hope that she would understand why I didn’t tell her sooner.
So Cara’s glower trips me up, and I know, I just know . I’m not sure how she found out—the lab must have sent her an update—but my secret is a secret no more.
“I can explain.”
Aidan appears right behind her, looking at me in a way he never has before. Helpless, wounded. So much so that I sense my heart tugging toward him.
“I’m scrolling through my emails, and I click on an article and this is what I see.” Cara possesses an angry fire and a forceful determination in every movement. Overcome with nausea, I take the phone she’s offering me and discover a familiar website on the screen. The headline punches me square in the gut.
“What the hell?” I mutter. This was not what I pitched, and this isn’t my story. How in the world did Abby, a new intern, write some explosive hot take based on my life?
“Your name is in there,” Cara says, pointing to the phone. “Right there.”
“How did you get this?”
“I subscribed. It was in this morning’s newsletter.”
Of course. She’s a wonderful, supportive human being who assumed I was her half sister. And now she and Aidan and everyone have found out the truth through an article on a clickbait website.
“I’m sorry. I was waiting for the right time.”
Aidan crosses his arms, and his disdain for me has me gasping for air.
“I was!” I go on. “When the lab reached out to me, they weren’t sure if the results were just off.”
“So you lied to me.” Cara snatches the phone from me and directs her pointer finger at my heart. “To all of us.”
“Love, listen.” Evvie steps in, but Cara’s own mother can’t salvage this wreckage. “She told me, but she got word right before the wedding. You were overjoyed to find out about her, to have a close girlfriend, a half sister—”
“You’re joking.” Cara runs both of her hands down her face in exhaustion. “You didn’t think to mention that some woman’s been pretending to be my half sister?”
“I wasn’t pretending,” I plead. “The whole time I’ve been here, I really did believe we were related.”
“I doubt that.”
“It’s true.” My heartbeat bangs like a drum. “I mean, I hoped we were related.” I’m close to begging her to listen to me. “The DNA lab believed the results were fine, but they had to make sure. I retested about a week ago, and I found—”
“A week?” Aidan exclaims.
We’ve attracted the full crowd now, with Aidan’s parents and Roger all filing into the kitchen. Even Winnie lifts his head from the dog bed to see what’s going on. Everyone’s expressions pierce me with all the questions I’ve asked myself over the past few weeks. Why didn’t I just tell them? Why am I even here?
“I waited until I was sure, which ended up being the wedding night, so—”
“She figured it was best not to trouble you amidst all the wedding prep,” Evvie says. “Surely you can understand that.”
“Mam, enough .”
“I wanted to tell you, but also…” I look at them all, and my heart sinks to the very bottom of my chest. “I guess I didn’t too. You were so wonderful, all of you were.” They’re slipping through my fingers, like I’m grabbing at sand. “I got swept up in being around all of you. And then you asked me to be your maid of honor, and I tried to say no, but you insisted so—”
“So this is my fault?”
“No.” I take a step toward her, but she backs up like I might turn her to stone if I get too close. “I expected nothing more than to come here and become friends and see you get married. I didn’t plan that you would treat me like—like—”
“Like a sister,” she spits out. “Because that’s what I thought you were.”
“Love, if you’re to be cross at anyone, be cross at me,” Evvie says.
“Oh, I am. I’m not some child you have to protect. I’m a grown woman. If I behaved like this to you, hid some secret from you because I said it would be better for you—which is absolute shite —you’d be furious.” Cara shakes her head in disgust, making me wish I could dig myself a hole to crawl in. “And you. I invited you here. I confided in you. I asked you to be the maid of honor at my wedding. Except you’ve been a stranger all along.”
My eyes prickle. “I’m still me. I’ve been me this whole time, just—”
“No,” Cara says as tears form. “I can’t trust a word you say.”
She storms off, with Yasmine right behind her. My breathing has gotten shallow, and I think my body’s gone numb. I yell out another desperate sorry , but it doesn’t matter. Everything’s spectacularly blowing up in my face, all at once and in slow motion.
“She’s off to her room,” Evvie says. “I’ll talk to her.” But once she goes and Roger follows her, that leaves me with Noah and Sarah McCarthy, and their son, who looks like I’ve crushed him to a million tiny pieces.
“I’m so sorry,” I rasp out before he runs out the door. I call out for him and follow him into the front yard. “Aidan, please.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“I came this close to confessing everything to you.”
“Yet you didn’t.”
“I couldn’t tell you and not Cara. I needed to talk to her first, so I waited.” I appeal to Aidan’s loyal side—the man who puts others before himself. “I planned on telling her and then you and everyone today, but that fucking article ruined it.”
“June, you can blame your workplace for how much you hate your life, but don’t blame it for this, too. This is down to you and no one else.”
The words slice through me. “You’re right. Please look at me. I agonized over this. I’m not saying what I did was right, but what would have happened if I’d spoken up?”
He scoffs and throws his hands to the sky. “No point thinking about it.”
“Everything would have changed. Everything. Even with the results in limbo, Cara never would have asked me to be her maid of honor. Maybe I wouldn’t have even had a place at the wedding anymore. You and me—”
“And your article. Not much to work with there, I suppose.” His voice catches, and the sight of him in pain because of me makes me feel like I’m drowning. “D-doesn’t matter what you intended, you fooled everyone. You fooled the town, all the guests at the wedding. You fooled…”
His last word goes unspoken. Me. You fooled me.
I swipe at my cheeks because they’re soaked with tears. Only hours ago, he was inside me and whispering devotions onto every inch of my skin, but now Aidan looks at me like I’m scum on the bottom of his shoe.
“You got what you wanted. You could make believe, go back home, and have your story, and what do any of us matter?” He straightens to stand even taller above me. “What did I matter?”
“Aidan. I’m more myself with you than I’ve ever been.”
He turns to walk away.
“I’m serious,” I continue, tears blurring my vision like an impressionist painting. “Cara and I might not be related, but I am everything else that you know about me.”
“I don’t know anything about you! You showed up two weeks ago, but you haven’t been you.”
“Time doesn’t matter. You said that yourself. Two weeks, two years, who cares? What I told you, about my mom, my grandma. Work. My dreams. That’s real. You can’t honestly believe you know nothing about me.”
He exhales and shakes his head to the sky. I leaped at the chance to have a family, to belong, so much I ignored that I never really belonged here.
And now I’m losing all of them.
“You don’t pick and choose when to be honest with people.” He musses up his hair in visible frustration. “That’s not how ‘real’ works. You’re either all in or you’re not.”
“And I’ve been all in. I swear.”
“No, you haven’t.” The volume of his voice rattles me. “This isn’t a healthy way to begin a relationship. Or what—whatever we were doing. You need to trust the other person. And not just in how they make you feel good so you can talk to them about your whole life, but in their actions. I’ve spent time on people before who…who lie. I’m done with that.”
I set a hand on his forearm, and a bright hope pulses through me when he doesn’t pull away. “I fucked up here, I get that. But with you, I was the most honest I’ve ever been. So much that it scares me.”
He seems to consider what I say, giving me some dangerous confidence before he releases himself from my grasp and scratches his neck. “C’mon.”
“What?”
Through a shaky breath, he says, “I’m going to take you back to mine to pack, and after that, I never want to see you again.”
“I swear, I told them to redact your name, Juney.”
Ethan has taken zero responsibility for what’s happened. He doesn’t care that he took my personal story and donated parts to someone else’s news-breaking byline.
“This is so screwed up,” I say.
“I’m sorry you feel that way. We’ve changed you to Anonymous Source, if that helps.”
“It doesn’t. The damage is done.”
“You can still write your piece, the personal narrative side of things. That might pair nicely with this investigative one. Which is blowing up, in case you were wondering.” He waits for me to reply, but I’m too angry at his excitement about page views to say a thing. “I…I really am sorry how it all went down,” he says, with something that sounds like empathy. “But we had to push this one through.”
Turns out, I’m not the only one to deal with an algorithmic error, which was the lab’s elaborate way of saying “software bug.” The editor in chief at The Edge discovered some serious internal issues with Double Helix Labs through dating the CEO. It’s why she finagled free kits for everyone, to get closer to the product. It’s why Andy sounded so inexperienced—he was. The lab had a wave of new hires to manage the mounting problems they encountered with testing and matching.
So for her hard-hitting piece, Abby worked undercover. While I knew her as an intern, she was a seasoned journalist with years of experience and not a single dog-photographer-profile piece to her name. She included my information because Ethan, in his oh-so-helpful way, relayed some of my notes and our conversations to her. In helping her, he disregarded me. During the editing process, the note to leave my name out of it was lost, if Ethan even did ask for that in the first place.
I’ve been a pawn in someone else’s game.
“To be fair, I sent you an email update,” Ethan says.
“I attended a wedding! A wedding I gave a speech at. A wedding where I’m in the pictures .”
“You’re getting a little emotional right now.”
I fight the urge to scream. Instead, I hug a pillow to my chest, hoping I don’t tear the thing to shreds.
After Aidan drove me back to his house, I packed my bags, and he arranged for me to stay at a bed-and-breakfast for the night. He despises me so much that he can’t stand having me under the same roof as him. Every piece of furniture in this room, every wall, and every inch of carpet is some shade of pink. The owner said she rarely gets guests, so it’s where her granddaughter sleeps when she visits. I’ll spend my last night in Ballygrá in a Barbie doll fever dream.
“I wish you’d called me,” I say. “Anonymous Source or not, I deserved to know.”
“I never forced you to take this piece.”
I snort a laugh, because while he didn’t explicitly tell me I had to go along with the story, he made it clear that if I killed the article, I’d pay for it with a resignation.
But the most frustrating part of all of this is that he’s also right. I called him because blaming him and blaming The Edge hurt less than admitting I’m the one to blame.
Me.
If I were smarter or braver or better, I would have pulled Cara aside the second I got the call. I wouldn’t have waited for the perfect time because the perfect time would never happen. And while saying something sooner would have ripped the O’Sheas and Aidan away from me, the truth is I don’t deserve the joy of a family. I never deserved someone as good as Aidan, either. I shouldn’t, not for a glimmer of a moment, have allowed myself to believe otherwise.
Ethan tells me he expects me back in the office later this week, and I hang up before he says goodbye.
The double bed squeaks when I lay on it, and I don’t have the energy to sit upright. I push my duffel onto the floor with a thud, and some of my clothes spill out. At Aidan’s, I packed my belongings in a rush, not bothering to fold anything, so the inside of my duffel was an explosion of outfits and toiletries. He sat at the dining room table, head low and avoiding eye contact at all costs.
When I entered his bedroom to grab a few final clothing items we’d flung around that afternoon, my tears threatened, but I sucked them down. The smell of Aidan planted itself in my memory—that powerful woodsy scent that makes me long to slide my fingers through his hair and straddle him.
I’ll miss that smell.
My phone rings, and my heart races with the anticipation of Cara or Aidan calling. Instead, Lissie’s name and photo pop up, filling me with an intense longing for New York. A desire to get as far away from here as possible.
“How are you?” she asks before I can say hello, and her generosity makes me well up again. “I got off my shift like two minutes ago and saw your texts. Holy cow.”
“She’s never going to speak to me again.”
“I’m sorry, June. Oh my god, I wanna hug you so hard right now. What can I do? Do you need me to come out there?”
“No. That’s silly.” I sniffle into a tissue. “If I can pry myself out of this bed tomorrow, I’ll be on my way home. What I could really use is a machine to go back in time and listen to you and tell Cara about that phone call. Then I wouldn’t be in this mess. I’m a moron.”
“You’re not,” says Lis, calm, kind, and certain of herself. “You are a smart person who made a not-so-smart decision. Which then turned into a huge destructive snowball. There’s no way you could have guessed this would be the outcome.”
Lis. Even after I’ve done something despicable, she still sees the good in me.
“Do you think Cara asked you to be her maid of honor just because she thought you were her half sister?”
“Yes. I wouldn’t have gotten an invite if that weren’t the case.”
“Okay, that technically is true, but she didn’t have to ask you to stand in her wedding. She did that because she likes you ,” Lis says. “She had a bunch of crappy friends who were terrible to her, and then you show up, and you’re fun and you’re cool and you’re the best type of friend someone could have.”
“You have to say that because you’re my friend.”
“I don’t. Listen to me—are you listening? You are a gem of this earth. I love you. I love how you text me when I’m not back at the apartment by a certain time and how you always buy an extra-unripe banana at the grocery store because the green ones are my favorite. You are a ride-or-die kind of gal, and Cara’s smart and picked up on that immediately, so of course she was jazzed to get to know you and have you in her wedding.”
“She hates me, and I can’t blame her.”
Lis sighs. “Have you talked to Aidan?”
“He hates me too.” The mention of him makes me wish I could sink into the floor. I deserve every bit of his disdain. “We fought, and he dropped me off at a Malibu Barbie Dream House-themed bed-and-breakfast. He’s made it clear that he wants nothing to do with me.”
“It’s okay to be heartbroken.”
“I’m not—I’m not heartbroken.”
“Okay, okay. But you spent every waking moment in Ireland with him, so I’d understand if you’re hurting over that too.”
My reflex to dismiss her hunch and move on doesn’t kick in. I’ve had my fill of pretending, so I go for blunt honesty instead.
“I like him. A lot. More than I’ve ever liked anyone. But that doesn’t matter.”
“It could.”
“We knew each other for two weeks. So what.”
“Do you remember Where’s Waldo?”
Where’s Waldo is a nickname we gave to a man Lis met, as she described it, one heavenly night in Hell’s Kitchen. The two of them spent the whole evening walking around the city, talking and laughing and talking some more. It was one of those magical New York nights that plays out like an art film.
“I don’t believe in the one that got away,” she says, “and he never called, so clearly he wasn’t the one. But I think about him sometimes, and I will for a long time.”
“That’s you, though. You fall in love, and you fall hard.”
“Maybe it’s you too, with him. There’s some people you meet and they just make an impression on you that lasts forever.”
I made an impression on Aidan, but it’s not the one I meant to.