Page 52 of The Exit Strategy

“Cole?”

My gaze snaps back to hers. She’s in an oversized T-shirt and shorts, her hair damp from a shower, and she’s holding a manila folder against her chest like a shield. But the thing that really gets me is that she’s barefoot. Like she just climbed out of the shower and decided to walk across the driveway, which means the stair lights did their job, and now I’m thinking about what else I can fix at her apartment instead of the fact that she’s standing in the one room in my house she was never supposed to see.

“The, ah—the door was open.” She’s staring at the drafting table again. At the designs spread across it like a confession. “I found a discrepancy in the Q2 insurance filing. And…your light was on.”

Her eyes aren’t on the folder—they’re on my blueprints.

I almost spread my arms wide to block her view.

Get her out of here. Guide her to the conference room and lock the door behind you.

That’s the thing about secrets. Once one is exposed, the dominoes begin to fall. And this is not a thread I want her to pull.

Yet I stand frozen. I don’t cover anything, and I don’t really know why. Or—I do. I just don’t want to examine it with her standing in my office, smelling like whatever flowery soap she uses that makes my entire respiratory system malfunction.

Show her something you’d normally hide.

Goddamn it, Nana Mae.

“These aren’t Haven designs,” Junie says. It’s not aquestion, and the ice from earlier today has cracked. Not fully thawed, but underneath it is the voice she uses when her brain has latched onto something her mouth hasn’t caught up to yet.

“No.” My voice is strained. There’s no way she remembers these designs. She would’ve been in high school when I first started them. “They’re not.”

She takes a step closer. Then another, and the fear—that fear that Natalie instilled—roars to life. If Junie remembers this…what else will she remember?

Junie scans the coastal library spread, and her soft expression is a fist to my sternum.

She understands it. She remembers.

Not the engineering. Not the math. She understands the intent. I see it in the way her gaze follows the lines from the reading alcove over the water, in the way her head tilts to track the light path I designed into the ceiling, in the way her lips part on a breath she doesn’t release.

She’s reading the building the way I designed it. Not as a structure, but as a feeling.

“The light,” she murmurs. Her fingertip hovers over the glass calculation—she doesn’t touch the vellum.

She remembers not to touch the vellum.

“You made it so the light moves through the building. It’s a clock.”

The thorn in my throat triples in size. “It’s a sun path. The reading rooms rotate through direct, diffused, and ambient light over the course of the day. Morning readers get east exposure. Afternoon gets west. The main hall tracks the zenith.”

“So the building tells you what time it is?”

“The building tells you where the sun is.” I set my pencildown because my hand isn’t steady enough to hold it. “There’s a difference.”

Her gaze lifts to mine, and I’m hit with the same disorienting vertigo from the porch—the feeling of being seen past every layer I’ve constructed. She’s not looking at me like I’m her boss or her older brother’s best friend or the man who left her behind. She’s looking at me like I’m someone who makes things matter.

It’s how she used to look at me when?—

When she was too young, and I was too old, and neither of us knew what was building between us.

“When did you make these?” She’s moved to the veterans’ memorial now. Her fingers trace the air above the corridor design as though she’s seen them before.

“Years ago.” I drop into my chair and let her look because the alternative will probably make her leave.

I don’t want her to leave.

“The library was my senior thesis.”