“We’ve been talking.” June set the shirt in the bag. “You’re going to stand up tomorrow and tell everyone the speculation is unfounded. That I’m just the nanny. I can’t be in the house when you do that.”
“I’m trying to protect—”
“I know what you’re trying to do.” June finally looked at her, and that was almost worse—not anger in her eyes, not anymore, just something tired and certain. “And maybe it’s the right call. Maybe your career matters more than this. But I can’t stand next to you while you make it, and I can’t pretend I don’t know what it means.”
“You’re not nothing to me. You’re—”
“So you’ve said.” June’s voice was very quiet. “And if that’s true, it makes it worse.”
She zipped the bag.
“Ember used to tell me I was naive,” she said. “That I wanted things that didn’t exist.” She picked up the bag, and when she looked at Melissa again, something in her expression cracked at the edges. “I’m not saying you’re her. I know you’re not. But I keep ending up in the same place, Melissa, and I have to figure out if that’s bad luck or if it’s me. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, and all that.”
She walked past her into the hallway. Melissa heard her pause at Lila’s door—a long moment of silence—and then the footsteps continued. The front door opened.
Closed.
An engine in the driveway. Then nothing.
Melissa stood in the empty guest room and looked at the space where June had been, and didn’t move for a long time.
“Where’s Miss Hollis?” Lila asked at breakfast, her eyes scanning the kitchen before she’d fully sat down.
“She had to go visit her parents for a little while.” The lie tasted like ash. “She’ll be back soon.”
“How soon?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart.”
Lila’s face crumpled, then went very still—a stillness Melissa recognized, an expression she’d watched her daughter teach herself. Feeling something and deciding not to show it.My face, on her face, and I put it there.
“She promised she wouldn’t leave,” Lila said. “She promised she’d always tell me the truth.”
“I know.”
“She lied.” Flat. Final. “Everyone lies. Everyone leaves.”
“Lila—”
But her daughter was already pushing back from the table, her breakfast untouched, and Melissa didn’t try to stop her. She sat alone at the kitchen table and looked at the hook where June’s apron used to hang, and at the herbs on the windowsill that June had brought from home, and at the sunflower Lila had drawn on a Post-it note still stuck to the refrigerator door.
I did the right thing,she told herself.I protected her.
She couldn’t make herself believe it.
The press conference was at eleven o’clock Monday morning.
Melissa stood at the podium in a pale grey blazer she’d chosen because it photographed well, her statement printed and reviewed and memorized, her expression calibrated to project calm competence. The room was fuller than she’d expected—local press, two regional outlets, a stringer from the Oregonian who’d driven down from Portland.
They’d come for the scandal. She was going to give them nothing.
“I appreciate the opportunity to address recent speculation directly,” she began, her voice smooth and even, the voice she’d spent twenty years building. “My personal life is private. The reporting that has circulated this week is based on unnamedsources and conjecture, and I will not dignify it with specific responses. What I will say is this: my focus remains entirely on the people of Oregon and on the work they elected me to do.”
A hand shot up immediately. “Senator Brandt, can you confirm or deny the nature of your relationship with the woman identified in the photos?”
“My household staff are private individuals and I won’t be discussing them.”
Household staff.The words came out of her mouth and she heard them and kept her face perfectly still.
