“Of course.” Melissa turned off the engine but didn’t move to get out. “I haven’t enjoyed a Fourth of July like that in… I can’t remember how long.”
“Me neither.”
They sat there for a moment, the car ticking as the engine cooled. Through the windshield, Melissa could see the house—dark windows, empty rooms, the life they’d temporarily created together waiting inside.
“I should get Lila to bed,” she said finally.
“Of course.”
June helped her carry things inside while Melissa carried Lila upstairs. She changed the sleeping girl into pajamas, tucked her into bed, kissed her forehead. Lila didn’t stir.
When Melissa came back downstairs, June was just putting the last things away.
“Goodnight,” June said. “And happy Fourth of July.”
“Happy Fourth of July.”
June disappeared down the hall toward her room, and Melissa stood alone in the dark foyer, listening to the silence of the house settle around her.
I’m in trouble, she thought.
The words surfaced unbidden, but once they were there, she couldn’t unsee the truth of them. She was attracted to June. Not just grateful, not just appreciative of her competence or her warmth with Lila—attracted. In a way that made her pulse race and her skin flush and her thoughts scatter like startled birds.
She’s too young. She’s an employee. She’s a woman.
But none of those objections seemed to matter as much as they should have. Not when she could still smell June’s shampoo on the night air. Not when she could still see the way June had looked at her during the fireworks, expectant and uncertain and impossibly beautiful.
Melissa climbed the stairs to her own room, closed the door behind her, and sat on the edge of her bed in the darkness.
I’m in so much trouble.
She didn’t know what to do about it. She only knew that something had shifted tonight, something fundamental, and there was no going back to the way things had been before.
Chapter 10
Burnt Brownies
June
Tuesday, July 7th
The rhythm of their days had shifted since Fourth of July.
First, it was the mornings. Melissa had stopped just hurrying out of the house before anyone else was up, instead taking her time so that she stood at the kitchen island when June came down to make breakfast. She’d be reading the newspaper, actual newsprint that she still insisted on having delivered, her reading glasses perched on her nose in a way that made her look softer, more approachable.
“Good morning,” Melissa would say, and June would pour her coffee—black, with one sugar that Melissa added when she thought no one was watching, as if sweetness were a secret vice she couldn’t admit to.
“Good morning,” June would answer, and start pulling ingredients from the refrigerator while Melissa turned pages.
They didn’t talk much during these mornings. They didn’t need to. The silence between them had become companionable,filled with small rituals that had accumulated without either of them deciding to create them. Their hands sometimes brushed when passing the sugar bowl, and neither of them mentioned it.
Lila had noticed the change too. “You and Mom are friends now,” she’d observed a few days earlier, with the matter-of-fact certainty of a seven-year-old.
“We’re… something,” June had said, because she didn’t know what else to call it.
They weren’t friends, exactly. Employers and employees weren’t friends. But they weren’t strangers anymore either, weren’t the carefully distant professionals they’d been in those first awkward days. They were something in between, something June didn’t have a word for.
But whatever it was, it made her heart beat faster every time Melissa walked into a room.
