Page 55 of The Exit Strategy

Her compliment shreds me all the way to my bones.

She says it like a fact. No performance, no flattery. Just a woman who reads the data and gives her findings.

I don’t have a response. Hearing her call my work extraordinary applies pressure to a fracture I thought was starting to heal.

“Goodnight,” she says, backing away from me and hurrying towards the door.

“Junie,” I croak.

She stops but doesn’t turn. She did the same thing when she paused on her stairs after our…conversation on the porch.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Then she’s gone. Bare feet slapping on the hardwood, down the stairs, and across the driveway. The motion sensors kick on as she races up her steps, but she doesn’t turn on her light.

And I wait for it to turn on for a long time. It never comes. Almost as if she knows I need it.

Eventually, my hand lowers to the locked drawer where I keep her blueprints—her dream house, built from conversations she probably doesn’t even remember having.

But this time, I don’t unlock the drawer. This time, the lock feels like protection more than cowardice. Even as I stare at the faces in the photo Junie only saw half of because the frame must have toppled over when I tossed the canister to my design table.

I stand it up now, knowing why I kept it. A reminder of what—of who—I’m protecting and from whom, but now I just want to burn it all because the story this photo tells isn’t about me and Junie. It’s Natalie’s calculated smile. My naivety in believing silence would protect us.

But silence never protected anyone. Silence is the thing that’s killing every chance I ever had with the woman who just walked out of my office, tugging on a diamond ring that refuses to budge.

My phone buzzes.

Junie?

Fen & Tonic:

Fen: Update: Stanley’s newsletter “Wedding Edition” just dropped. There’s a section on catering. Dollie’s volunteered her cake-making skills.

Hudson: Cole. The ring.

Nolan: I’m booking a flight.

I should tell Nolan that the ring is stuck, that nothing happened.

Except something did happen, and I don’t know how long I can keep up the lies. Not the engagement—that’s a comedy of errors I’ll deal with tomorrow. It’s what happens next that has me pocketing my phone before I can respond and then returning to my work.

Not because Nana Mae wants me to beat her rival.

But because a woman who reads blueprints like poetry told me my work was extraordinary.

And for the first time in years, I’m stupid enough to believe her.

11

A STORM WITH A GRUDGE

JUNIE

The sky turnsthe color of a bruise at two in the afternoon, and by three, Porchlight Cove is being swallowed whole.

I’ve lived through Boston nor’easters. I’ve lost power in February with nothing but Nolan’s med school textbooks to burn for warmth—hypothetically because he would have killed me—but a South Carolina coastal storm is a different animal entirely. It doesn’t creep in. It arrives like it’s been personally offended by the existence of dry land and has come to settle the score.