Page 180 of The Exit Strategy

It feels like a bribe.

“This portfolio…” His nerves show when the muscle in his cheek twitches. “Contains the next two hours of your life. We’re going to write, role play, and record the thing you’ve been putting off.”

“Fen.” Acid floods my stomach, so I set down the coffee.

“I haven’t finished my proposal. This isn’t a press release. It’s not a statement. It’s whatever you decide it will be, but it’s time for you to tell your story, and I’m here as your friend, your unpaid PR consultant, and the person who’s been sitting in a war room with your brother and our lawyer for way too many hours waiting for you to be ready to rewrite your narrative. The thing you don’t understand—that all of us see—is that youareready. You’ve always been ready. You’ve just been waiting for permission when that permission should’ve always come from you.”

I reach for my water bottle with a shaky hand. “I don’t have a good track record with posting shit, Fen.”

“We’re not posting anything…yet. First, we’re going to storyboard the fuck out of it, and I won’t let you make a bad decision today. Then we’re going to record it. After that, I’ll edit the hell out of it like it’s the next Hollywood blockbuster because I come with receipts. The cost of trying is zero, but the price of doing nothing is too high.”

He opens the portfolio and then starts taping sheets of paper to my kitchen cabinets. Under those, he tapes up pages of notes in three different colors of ink. Grace’stimeline in red. Natalie’s GoFundMe with Cole’s projects written in blue. Screenshots from my own vlog and social media with notes for each in a vibrant purple.

It all lays out the destruction of my life in a rainbow of truths and lies but leaves out a key detail—my parents.

“When did you do all of this?” I ask, my fingers trailing over a screenshot of a vlog I made when I was sixteen. It’s frozen on Natalie’s face and the sneer she threw my way right before she said something vile. When he asked for permission to go through them, I didn’t realize they’d end up as wallpaper.

“Sunday night and most of Monday morning. Hudson annotated my notes behind me, fact checking everything three times. We’ve been waiting for you to invite us in, and you haven’t, so I’m coming at you like the Kool-Aid Man. Sit down.”

I sit. “We’re not discussing what my parents did?” I ask, staring at the storyboard.

He shakes his head. “That might have legal ramifications for you and Cole, so we’re not going to take chances with that until we have to. But trust! Cole, Nolan, and Hudson are being vicious about it.”

There are too many possibilities to fathom.

“That’s their problem to solve, Junie. This is yours.”

Right. I have a job to do too.

“Tell me what you want people to know, Junie. Not what you want to say. What you want them toknow. They’re very different things.”

I open my mouth, and he stands, pulling markers from his bag and walking to the first sheet of paper taped on my cabinet.

“I want them to know that I…was wrong.”

He frowns. “Go on.”

Collecting my thoughts is like catching fireflies. They blink brightly and fade just as fast. “Um…I guess they should know I was wrong for waiting so long to stand up for myself. That by the time I did, the only way I knew how to move forward was to react. I want them to know that…I’m not who they tried to create. I’m not the villain.”

“Junie, you’re not the villain. You’ve just learned to be your own antagonist. We can work with this, keep going.”

And for the next two hours, we do.

“This is really good,” Fen says, stepping back from the storyboard we’ve created.

His phone chimes, The Clash’s “I Fought the Law” playing loudly in my small kitchen.

“Hudson hates this song.” He laughs while checking the message.

“Hudson says, and I quote, ‘Tell her Cole and I went through all Natalie’s old blackmail, and we can prove duress using her threats against Junie. We’ll handle the foreclosure, loan, and any legal ramifications once I obtain a warrant to get proof that Tommy processed the original loan illegally. Cole filed an AIA ethics report, naming himself the documented author of three projects, and he included proof of authorship, so this goes beyond Meridian now—he’s going after Natalie’s license. The article goes live at eight tomorrow morning. Don’t be cute, Fen, tell her verbatim.’”

My stomach crawls into my throat—I was just dropped off the top of a roller coaster I wasn’t prepared for.

Cole is…all in?

“He filed,” I say.

“Without telling anyone,” Fen confirms. “Including me. We only found out because he listed Hudson as his attorney,so he received an email confirmation. Cole signed his name to the public record on his own work. He made a choice to go against Natalie. He made a choice to fight—even before the gala.”