Page 103 of The Exit Strategy

Sponsored by the firm that has been operating for six years on the scaffolding of my silence.

The sad thing is, I’m confident my design that Nana Mae chose will win. What I can’t predict is what will happen when it does.

I pick up the invitation, feeling the heavy cardstock in my hand, the Meridian logo embossed at the top—their name over my designs, except usually I don’t have to look at it so…directly.

The awards dinner is coming up. The entries have been submitted. Mine among them, thanks to Nana Mae.

I drop the invitation face down on the table.

Then I pick it up again.

“I’ll go with you,” Junie says.

My muscles pull taut, like I’ve been caught in the act ofsomething nefarious. I almost smile, seeing Junie straddle the threshold to my office. She nods toward the invitation. It’s no use hiding it from her now.

“If you want me to.” Her snark is nowhere to be found.

I glance down at the invitation before dropping it into my desk drawer, out of sight. As much as I want Junie at my side, the thought of what might happen keeps me from jumping at the offer.

“I don’t think you know what you’re offering.” The locked drawer to my left feels like a living, breathing heartbeat—guilt, that’s what it is. A drawer full of guilt signed by Natalie Moore herself.

“People always underestimate what I can handle.” She’s standing at the edge of my drafting table, looking at my revised garden layout with the precise attention she brings to everything numerical.

Her cheek twitches when her eyes track the adjusted pathway that now accounts for the correct wheelchair radius. The path I fixed because she told me to, three seconds into seeing the design.

Her finger drags over the edge of my desk, as though she’s tracing the design before her with a loving touch, but she doesn’t comment on the new configuration.

She doesn’t have to. The gleam in her eyes says it all.

There’s something in the space between us that’s new—or not new, but named differently than it was a week ago. It’s not the charged silence of two people maintaining careful distance. It’s something…easier.

“The awards dinner,” I say.

“What about it?”

“I do want you there.” It’s as simple and as complicated as that. I want her there. With me. “Not as a cover story or as Nana Mae’s chess piece.” I hold her gaze. “With me. As…mine.” My gaze drops to her ring finger, and my chest puffs out with pride or happiness, probably both.

It feels like a symbol of where we would be if Natalie hadn’t chosen destruction. And since I caught Junie playing with it the other day and know that she’s wearing it because she chooses to, not because it’s stuck, it means even more.

I don’t pry this secret out of her though. She’ll tell me when she’s ready.

Junie nibbles on her bottom lip. It does unfortunate things to my cock, and I’m thankful to have the drafting table between us.

“It’s hosted by Meridian,” she says carefully. “And there’s a $50,000 prize attached to first place.”

My cock instantly deflates, but I nod.

“Fifty thousand is very close to the number that’s been staring at me for two months, Cole. It could be a way to cover?—”

“Yes.”

“Are you going because Nana Mae is in a feud with Paula Van Holten, or because if you win, The Haven gets out of this mess?” Junie’s assessing me the same way she attacks her spreadsheets…like something isn’t quite adding up.

“I do what I have to,” I say. “I always do.”

Sadness changes her expression, and I wish I could take back my words. “Whatever Meridian is to you, whatever happened with them?—”

“They’re nothing to me now,” I say honestly.