Page 91 of The Exit Strategy

His jaw is set in the way I imagine him during a deposition when he’s already operating four moves ahead of whoever’s across the table, and he’s turned that expression directly on me.

“Cole.” He grips my hand between us while we clap each other on the back in some semblance of an embrace. His handshake is aggressive.

“Hud.” I match his grip.

Eventually he releases me, but not before making a point of staring at the garage apartment, then back at me without saying a word, which is somehow the loudest he’s ever been.

Fen bounds up my driveway from whatever spectacle he’s undoubtedly been participating in and throws an arm around Hudson’s neck with reckless affection that only works because Hudson accepts it from only two people on the planet and Fen is one of them.

It interrupts the tension between us, but doesn’t dissolveit, and Hudson’s frost toward me doesn’t thaw over lunch either. He’s not cold—he’s controlled, which is when Hud is at his most unsettling. There’s no telling where or how he’ll strike, you just know it’s coming.

The longer he and Junie talk, the more I begin to realize that he’s frustrated with me in the way that only people who love you correctly can be—not angry at what I’ve done, but furious by what I haven’t.

That’s fine.

He can get in line.

Junie’sdifferent with them all here, and I’m not sure how to internalize that.

She’s not a different person, just…expanded. She laughs more easily, argues faster, wears less of the armor she keeps in place when it’s just the two of us.

At dinner, she and Fen spend forty-five minutes building an absolutely unhinged theory about whether Grace’s entire redemption arc is a coordinated PR strategy that has everyone’s attention.

“The thing is,” Nolan says, “Grace is benefiting from a parasocial attachment loop. Her audience doesn’t actually know either of you. They’ve constructed that parasocial relationship with two characters who happen to share your names. The emotional investment is real for them, but the object of it isn’t.”

Junie just stares at him with an open mouth. “That’s the most clinical and useless thing you’ve ever said to me, and you once described our mother’s funeral as ‘a necessary ritual of grief.’”

“That’s not—” Nolan blushes hard. “I was in med school—it’s not as though I said that during the actual service.”

She tosses a bread roll that bounces off his shoulder. He catches the second one without breaking eye contact.

“Traitor,” she mutters.

“I’m just saying the algorithm—” Fen snaps his mouth shut when she points at him, then Nolan.

“Traitor, both of you. Clinical and complicit.”

Fen raises his glass. “I prefer strategically adjacent.”

Junie lifts her nose in the air as though her word is final.

Nolan keeps talking, but she’s stopped listening with her whole body. She’s using just enough of her brain to track when she needs to weigh in, which is a skill she’d perfected by the age of thirteen after years of sitting through her mother’s pointed digs about how Junie’s mere existence had ruined her life.

It’s something that’s obviously now ingrained deep.

I was there when it became part of her. I was there when she realized it was her biggest asset in compartmentalizing her pain.

Nana Mae refills everyone’s glass and catches my eye across the table. She doesn’t have to say anything. My feelings are written all over my face for anyone who cares to look closely enough, and there’s nothing I can do about it when surrounded by the very people who taught me to let down my walls in the first place.

There’s a knock on the door right before it opens, and Katie walks in. For once, I’m grateful for her pushiness and aggressive cheerfulness as she wedges herself between Fen and Nolan while I clear the table.

Katie’s knack for commandeering a room is also what allows me to slip outside for some air.

Moments later, Hudson appears beside me at the railing.

“She’s looking better,” he says quietly.

“I’m glad.”