Page 93 of The Exit Strategy

“Cole.”

I’ve been staring at the lantern for too long. “Yeah?”

“I’m sorry it came out wrong back then. I’m sorry you’vebeen carrying that. I—Is that why you keep trying to pull away from us all?”

I shake my head, my thoughts not organizing quickly enough to speak.

“I’m not sorry I was watching out for her,” he says. “I’ll never be sorry for that. But if I made you think I wouldn’t approve—” He curses under his breath. “That was never the case. And every time I’ve tried to bring her up since, you shut down. I just thought, now, with you both together?—”

“There were…other reasons,” I say, the words shattering like broken glass on a silent night. “For leaving. Our conversation wasn’t the only one.”

“I’ve wondered,” he says, like he has a theory on what went wrong but understands that those reasons belong to me. “But it was the one that made everything else feel inevitable, wasn’t it?”

It’s not a question—it sounds like a truth he just now understands.

“She plans to leave as soon as she fixes your accounting problem.” He rests his hand briefly on my shoulder—there and gone—just as Junie intends to do. “Just so you know what you’re working with.”

His footsteps shuffle across the porch, then the screen door to my home snaps shut behind him.

I focus on the shadows created by the porch light and the six years of wrong conclusions I’ve been wrestling with.

Junie’s bedroom light turns on, and I cross the driveway without deciding to.

Her stairs illuminate beneath my feet—the warm glow of a fix I made for her without being able to say why.

I knock once.

Two seconds of silence.

Then the door opens, and she’s standing before me in anoversized T-shirt I recognize from my hockey days at Brookline Heights High School.

She’s wearing my shirt—the one with my name and number on the back—the one I intentionally left in her room when I left Boston behind, and my heart trips over itself trying to reach her.

Her bare feet and bare legs call to the bare truth I want to set free.

My gaze trails up her bare thigh, past the oversized shirt, over her crimson-flushed neck and cheeks.

When I finally meet her eye, she steps back to let me in.

Her apartment is quiet and warm. She’s added some colorful succulents that will be nearly impossible for her lack of a green thumb to kill. There are throw pillows in turquoise and a happy yellow that’s a stark contrast to her normal disposition.

She may intend to leave, but she’s also been making this place a home.

Junie crosses the room, leaning against the bookshelf to put some space between us, which is how I know she understands that something has shifted for me. She’s always been fluent in a way I don’t say out loud. It’s the most inconvenient thing about her.

“There are still things I have to tell you,” I say. “Things that will be—” I search for a word that isn’tcomplicated. There isn’t one. “Hard. And I need you to know that going in.”

The sharpness in her gaze doesn’t frighten me anymore. It never should have.

“I’ve been carrying hard things my entire life, Cole.”

“I know.” I cross the room. Not all the way, just enough to be in the same gravitational field as her, where the air is charged with everything that’s always sat there waiting to benamed. “That’s why I’m not adding to the pile tonight—not everything, anyway.”

She laughs. It’s not a happy sound. “One day, you’ll learn that it’s not your job to protect me from every inconvenient truth, Cole.”

No, it’s not my job to protect her from every pain point. Just the ones that could do irreparable damage to this beautifully broken soul.

“What did Nolan say to you?” There’s my girl. The one who narrows her gaze to assess the truth and all possible outcomes. “On your porch just now.” She’s not the least bit embarrassed about having watched us.