“Don’t be. It’s politics. I should be used to it by now.” But her voice wavered, just slightly, the composure thinning at the edges. “I just… I keep thinking about home. About you. Not abstractly.” A pause, like she was deciding something. “I’m lying here thinking about you specifically. The way you argued with me last week about olive oil in pasta water, like it was a matter of personal honor. The way you look when you’re cooking.” Another pause. “I don’t know what to do with that.”
June closed her eyes. Something moved through her chest, warm and aching at the same time.
“Come home,” she said. “Tomorrow. Come home, and we’ll figure out the rest together.”
“I’ll be there by dinner.”
“I’ll make your favorite.”
“You don’t know my favorite.”
“Chicken and rice casserole. The one I made the first week. You had seconds and then pretended you hadn’t.”
Melissa laughed—a real laugh, tired but genuine. “You’re too observant for your own good.”
“You’re worth paying attention to.”
Silence. Then, softly: “I don’t deserve you.”
“Let me be the judge of that.”
The line went quiet, and June could hear her breathing, steadying itself. She thought about the courthouse photograph. The straight spine. The practiced composure that had nothing to do with the woman lying alone in a hotel room in Salem sayingI’m thinking about you specifically.
“Goodnight, Melissa,” she said. “Come home safe.”
“Goodnight, June.”
The line went dead. June turned off the lamp and went to bed, and lay there in the dark thinking about waiting for things to go wrong, and how the terrifying thing wasn’t that this might fall apart. The terrifying thing was how much she wanted it not to. How completely, helplessly much.
She didn’t sleep for a long time.
Chapter 15
Summer Storm
Melissa
Thursday, July 23rd
The sky was darkening by the time Melissa pulled into the driveway, though that might mostly be due to the clouds stacking up, splattering fat raindrops against the windshield. She sat in the car for a moment, engine off, watching the droplets make their way down the glass. Her whole body ached with exhaustion—three days of meetings, of carefully worded arguments, of watching her coalition fray at the edges while Thornfield’s lawyers tied everything in procedural knots.
Her phone lit up on the passenger seat. David. She watched it ring and go to voicemail, then picked it up and turned it face-down.
Later,she told herself.Think about it later.
Right now, all she wanted was to see her daughter. And June.
She grabbed her bag and made a dash for the front door as the rain began in earnest.
The house was warm and lit, and the moment she stepped inside, she heard Lila’s voice from the living room, high and excited, talking a mile a minute about something June was apparently required to respond to with appropriate enthusiasm.
“—and then the giant otter ate a whole fish in like two seconds, and that’s because they have really strong jaws, and did you know they live in families called romps? That’s such a funny word. Romp. Romp romp romp.”
“Very funny word,” June agreed. “Almost as funny as ‘murder’ for crows.”
“That one’s scary, not funny.”
“Fair point.”
