Page 18 of The Exit Strategy

Game on, Junie. Game fucking on.

“Good morning, Juniper.”

She flinches on her name. She never did like me calling her Juniper, and it appears that hasn’t changed either.

She lifts her coffee in acknowledgment. No words. Just vibes. Hostile ones at that.

Nana Mae, who’s been lying in wait like a woman who was born for this exact moment, rounds the corner, holding a laptop and a banker’s box stuffed with folders.

“There she is. Morning, sweetheart.” Nana Mae deposits the box on the kitchen table with a thud that rattles the salt and pepper shakers. “These are the financials for the last eighteen months. The laptop has our accounting software, which I use loosely because the last person who managed it, Devin, had the organizational skill of a squirrel on drugs.”

Junie’s gaze flicks to me, then back to my grandmother. “Devin?”

“My nephew.” Nana Mae’s tone could frost glass. “He was Cole’s CFO until about six months ago when he decided that vacationing was a viable career path. But that’s neither here nor there.”

It’s very much here and there, but I let Nana Mae steer.

“Fix this, dear. Cole operates out of his home office because he insists on living in the model home, so we’ve set you up in the conference room, which is really just the formal living room at the front of the house.” Nana pats Junie’s shoulder. “Cole, don’t you have a meeting with the landscape committee?”

My gaze cuts to Junie. I expected Nana Mae to put Junie to work, but I didn’t expect her to just dump her into the middle of a landfill. Not with…everything going on in her personal life.

But it’s a clear dismissal because there is no landscape committee meeting. Nana Mae is operating on the principle that Junie and I in the same room for extended periods will either result in a homicide or a romance, and she’d like to control the variable.

“I’ll check in with you later,” I mumble with no idea who it’s aimed at.

“Looking forward to it, Mr. Whittaker.” Junie displays the smile she uses when she’s lining up a kill shot.

Mr. Whittaker. Christ. This won’t end well.

I grab my keys and get the hell out of my own kitchen before I say something I’ll regret.

Since there’s no meeting, the only place for me to go is the clubhouse. As I’m walking the path there, I check in with Frank about his gutters and make a mental note to clear them out when he and Dollie are at church next Sunday.

Then Stanley nearly takes me out with his golf cart while trying to show me his new dashcam footage. He only hightails it away from me when Marley, the self-appointed social coordinator, walks up to give me a seventeen-minute update on the parking situation here at the clubhouse, which is not a situation, because there are only ever twelve cars and forty spots.

By the time I make it back to the house, at least two hours have passed, and Junie has taken over the conference table like a five-foot dictator staging a military operation.

The banker’s box is gutted, its contents organized into neat stacks. Her laptop is open and projecting three different spreadsheets to various screens. She has a pen between her teeth, one in the knot in her hair, and another tapping aggressively against the wood grain of my table, all while she mutters.

Mutters.

I lean against the doorframe to take it all in because walking in there feels like stepping into something sacred. Her blue eyes are electric. The exhaustion from last night has been replaced with something I haven’t seen in way too long.

Focus. Purpose. The quiet ferocity of a woman who was built to succeed.

“Did he pay this invoice twice?” Junie says, I think to herself. The pen clicks against her teeth. “Who reconciles accounts like this? Animals?”

She still hasn’t noticed me, and I’m not announcing myself because watching Juniper Mercer in her element is the most dangerous thing I’ve done in years, and I can’t stop myself.

This is the girl who made a perfect score on her statistics final and then got pissed because she got a B plus in pottery. The woman who mapped out a five-year career plan in a Google spreadsheet with color-coded tables. Numbers are her love language, and right now, she’s speaking fluently.

My chest does something between aching and expanding. Something that feels like pride in a person I have no right to be proud of.

“Your ex-CFO was wildly incompetent,” she says, startling me into standing upright. She doesn’t even look at me, but my body responds to her as if it knows her circadian rhythm. “These numbers just don’t add up, Cole. They’re designed to look as though they add up while actively not adding up. That takes skill or complete cognitive maladroitness.”

“You…knew I was standing here?”

“You breathe loudly.”