Saturday, August 1st
The morning started perfectly, which should have been June’s first warning.
She woke to sunlight streaming through her windows and the smell of coffee in the air—Melissa must have gotten up early. The past week had been a kind of suspended bliss, the two of them finding stolen moments between Lila’s activities and Melissa’s work calls. Soft kisses in the kitchen. Hands brushing under the table at dinner. The quiet intimacy of falling asleep on the couch together after Lila went to bed, then reluctantly separating to their own rooms before morning. It wasn’t enough. It was everything.
June stretched, smiled at the ceiling, and reached for her phone to check the time.
Seventeen text messages. Four missed calls. Three voicemails. Her stomach dropped.
The first text was from Tyler:
June. Call me. Now.
The second was from her mother:
Sweetheart, are you okay? We saw the article. Call us.
The third was a link. Just a link, no comment, from a number she didn’t recognize.
June’s hands were shaking as she clicked it.
Senator Brandt’s Unconventional Summer: Questions Swirl About Live-In Nanny Arrangement
The headline hit her like a tidal wave crashing down on her, cold and unrelenting. She scrolled down, reading faster than she could process, catching phrases that seared themselves into her brain.
…sources close to the family describe an unusually intimate relationship...
…the twenty-three-year-old nanny, whose name we are withholding...
…questions about Senator Brandt’s judgment come at a crucial time for her struggling infrastructure bill...
…divorced two years ago amid rumors of personal instability...
…some observers wonder whether the senator’s focus is where it should be...
There was a photo. Melissa at some political event, looking polished and composed, every inch Senator Brandt. And next to it, a second photo—grainy, clearly taken from a distance—of Melissa and June and Lila at the Fourth of July festival. The three of them on a blanket, watching fireworks. Looking like a family.
June stared at it. She remembered that evening all too well—the warmth of Melissa’s shoulder against hers, Lila drowsy between them, the sky exploding overhead. Someone had been watching. Someone had been there with a camera while Junethought they were just three people at a fireworks show, and now that moment was evidence. Now it was a headline.
Everyone in Redwood Hollow can guess.
June set down the phone. Picked it up again. Set it down.
Her bedroom door opened.
“June, good, you’re up.” Melissa stood in the doorway, still in her robe, her face pale. “I need to talk to you.”
“I saw it.”
A pause, perhaps Melissa recalibrating that she didn’t have to break the news.
“I’m so sorry,” she said instead. “I don’t know how they—I don’t know who—” Melissa’s voice cracked. “David called twenty minutes ago. It’s everywhere. Not just the gossip sites anymore. The Herald picked it up. There’s going to be questions, and press, and—”
“My name isn’t in it.”
“Not yet. But—”
“It’ll come out.” June heard her own voice as if from a distance, calm and flat. “They’ll find me, and my family, and everyone will know.”
