Page 184 of The Exit Strategy

“Someone tossed us a Hail Mary,” Hud says once I’m seated. “Tommy’s made some enemies at PC Trust, so when they heard there was a warrant coming, one of them pulled every hard copy she could find and even highlighted everything she thought was suspicious. I skimmed them, and even a quick look indicates that Junie’s house wasn’t the first time he benefited from a shady loan.”

Fucking Tommy. Hudson’s right. I should have done much more than knock out a couple of his teeth.

“This woman reached out to me quietly. I won’t gain access to any of it officially until the warrant is submitted. But she also did me a favor and looked into the loan you obtained to buy out the original one.”

“Hud, don’t do anything that can get you disbarred.” That’s exactly why I didn’t go to him in the first place.

“Have some faith,” he grumbles. “The good news is, Tommy does appear to have kept everything about your loan aboveboard. That means, regardless of what he told you, you didn’t do anything illegal. That doesn’t mean it’s right—you should’ve still come to us—but it wasn’t illegal.”

I’ve spent so many years worried that I wouldn’t be able to protect Junie that I had no idea some small piece of me was also worried that I would be implicated in her parents’ fraudulent schemes. The relief nearly knocks me over.

“Hudson?” Nana Mae says.

“Eight on the dot.” His eyes haven’t left the clock on his screen. “ArchDailyrefreshes on the hour.The Architect’s Newsis two minutes after.” It doesn’t stop him from obsessively refreshing his screen.

The TV mounted above the fireplace is turned on but holds the Apple emblem idle on the screen. Fen must be planning to stream Junie’s video so we can watch it unfold life-sized.

At eight, Hudson’s screen refreshes, and he pushes his laptop to the center of the coffee table so we can all see it. The headline is clean. Direct.

“Architects at War.”

The subtitle is less flashy, but just as direct.

“Architect Cole Whittaker Files AIA Ethics Report Naming Himself as Author of ‘The Whisper of Souls Memorial’ and Two Other Projects Credited to Meridian’s Natalie Moore.”

Hudson slowly scrolls as we all read. The article is six pages long. It doesn’t name Marcus or the blackmail. It simply states public records as fact. I read it once, the way you’d read your own obituary if it had accidentally run early.

Nana Mae huffs. A small, satisfied sound. “Good. That’s that.”

“That,” Fen says, looking up from his iPad with an expression I don’t like, “is not all.”

Every head in the room turns to him slowly as he presses some buttons on his iPad, and my TV freezes on a recent image of Junie.

I might actually be sick. She looks sad. And so fucking lost. All I want to do is fix her.

“It’s live,” Fen whispers.

“This is going to be fucking brutal.” Hudson curses.

Nana Mae doesn’t even scold him for the swear because her gaze is locked on Junie too. Every person in this room loves her.

“Be warned,” Fen says. “She sent it to me last night. Icleaned up the audio, and timed the b-roll, dropping it in the queue. It’s going to—” His gaze lands on mine. “It’s going to hurt to watch it.”

You could hear a pin drop as Fen presses play.

Junie’s sitting in her apartment with her hair piled in a messy way on her head. It’s how she looks when she thinks no one’s watching. This—the real Junie—is who she’s presenting to the world, and it chokes the life out of me. She’s wearing no makeup. She’s not using a filter. She hasn’t done a single thing to look ready for the camera.

Then she looks straight into the lens, and it’s as though she’s staring straight into my heart.

“My name is Juniper Mercer,”she begins.“You know me as the villain in many tales, but we all know every good story has three converging points. You’ve heard theirs. Now I’ll tell you mine. Then you can decide the truth.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Nana Mae says.

Hudson sets down his pen.

“I lost my mom when I was sixteen years old. We had a complicated relationship, but it was ours. At twenty-four, I now understand that she loved me the only way she knew how—with timelines, requirements, expectations, and limits. But she was my mom, and I witnessed her die slowly over the course of three years.”

“Fuck.” Nolan drops down beside me.