“I’ve been performing strength for so long,” she said. “I don’t know what’s underneath anymore.”
“I think you’re starting to find out.” Rachel picked up her coffee again. “Go get your daughter. Not the nanny, not David, not the bill. Go get your daughter today and actually be with her. Let that be enough for one day.”
Melissa nodded slowly. Then, quietly: “And June?”
Rachel looked at her steadily. “You stood at a podium and called her household staff. You’re going to have to do something significant to answer for that. Not a conversation in a kitchen. Something real.” She paused. “You’ll know what it needs to look like when you’re ready to do it. The question is whether you’re going to be brave enough.”
Melissa sat with that for a long moment.
Then she stood up, walked to the bottom of the stairs, and called her daughter’s name.
Chapter 18
Intervention
June
Monday, August 10th
The Hollis kitchen looked the same as it always had—mismatched mugs, faded wallpaper, the worn patch of linoleum in front of the sink—but June felt like a stranger in it. She stood at the counter, kneading bread dough for the third time that week, and tried to remember why she’d ever thought staying in Redwood Hollow was a good idea.
Because no matter how far I run, I’m still me.
She punched the dough harder than necessary.
Eight days. Eight days since she’d walked out of the Brandt house with a bag over her shoulder and her heart in pieces. Eight days of sleeping in her childhood bedroom, staring at the Howl’s Moving Castle poster, wondering how she’d ended up right back where she started. The ambushes were the worst part—not the big obvious grief but the small specific ones. The smell of coffee in the morning that wasn’t Melissa’s kitchen. The sound of the neighbor’s kid outside that wasn’t Lila’s voice. Wakingup in the night and reaching for warmth that wasn’t there. And underneath everything, looping quietly, Lila’s voice from that first Saturday on the couch:you’re good at hair things.Such a small thing. June hadn’t known, then, how much she’d needed to be told she was good at something.
Her phone sat on the counter, silent. Melissa hadn’t called. Hadn’t texted. June told herself that was what she wanted—space, distance, time to think clearly.
She’d told herself a lot of things over the past eight days.
The silence felt like an answer anyway. Like Melissa had weighed everything up and reached a conclusion and was now on the other side of it, moving forward, doing the senator thing, and June was just—a chapter that had closed.
Stop it,she told herself.You don’t know that.
But she didn’t know anything else either, and the not-knowing was its own misery.
“You’re going to murder that bread.”
June looked up. Her mother stood in the doorway, coffee cup in hand, watching her with the careful expression she’d been wearing since June came home.
“It needs more kneading.”
“It needs to rest. So do you.” Laura crossed to the counter and gently took the dough from June’s hands, covering it with a clean towel. “Sweetheart. You can’t bake your way out of this.”
“I can try.”
“June.”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Mom.”
“I know you don’t. But you’ve made four loaves of bread, two batches of cookies, and something with so much chocolate I’m concerned for my arteries.” Laura leaned against the counter, her eyes soft. “You loved her, didn’t you?”
The question landed like a blow. June had been avoiding that word—love—as if not saying it could make it less true.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters.”
