“I’m the only one who wants it. And the only one my dad trusts.”
She felt a swell of something in her chest then, an acknowledgment, maybe, that Sullivan was different, singular. And hers. June lifted her cheek from where it rested on his shoulder and looked around the property. There was the sprawling house with its layered decks and custom-built hot tub. The carefully maintained barns and outbuildings. The bricked-in sign that designated the entire farm a national heritage site. One of the smaller barns had been built in 1876 and meticulously reconstructed a hundred years later. Sometimes people came to take pictures in front of the rough-hewn stone. June had never wanted something so domestic, so predictable, but all at once the realization washed over her: It could all be hers. If she wanted it.
She felt the draw of that belonging even now, even as she traced the path to the Tates’ farm, every muscle in her body stiff with rage. Sullivan had offered her something back then that she didn’t even have the understanding to know she would want or need: home. The sort of fellowship that attached her to something greater than herself and ensured that she would never, no matter what, be alone. More than anything else, she felt alone. So whatever negligible claim she had to Willa, she would protect it with a ferocity she hadn’t even known she was capable of.
If Franklin and Annabelle Tate still lived on the property, Juniper wasn’t sure what she would do. Of course, they knew exactly who she was, and she doubted they would react kindly to her sudden appearance on their doorstep. But if she was right, and Sullivan and Ashley were now the patriarch and matriarch of the Tate Family Farms, she knew the confrontation wouldn’t go much better. She was on a fool’s errand.
The long roundabout in front of the Tates’ palatial, columned house had been paved since Juniper had seen it last. Back in the day it had been gravel, just like every other farm driveway for a hundred miles, and Sullivan had driven right off it to park on the patchy grass beside the two-stall garage. Now there were four stalls, with carriage house doors and dormer windows in what looked like a loft above the new construction. The double front door was a confection of wrought iron and glass, and there was even a fountain iced over in the very middle of a bricked walkway. A dozen other little changes made the transformation subtle but complete: the Tate Family Farms were no longer an impressive property in a conservative working-class community: they were a manor, a plantation that made no apologies for a level of status and wealth that far outweighed anything in the entire region. It was breathtaking, but indecent somehow.
Juniper wavered in the driveway for a moment, but when she thought of the tiny house where she was living and how it could easily fit in the garage of the Tates’ gorgeous estate, a lick of fury rekindled. They slashed her tires. She had no doubt it was them, and in the face of their ridiculous affluence, that level of cruelty was just obscene.
The front door was fitted with a knocker (a knocker!) in the shape of a teardrop, but no doorbell. So, hand shaking and thumb still wrapped in a tissue now matted with dried blood, Juniper lifted the knocker and let it drop. Twice. A few seconds after the pair of thuds echoed through the house, Juniper could see Ashley descend the central staircase at a jog.
Was it relief that flooded through Juniper? Terror? She only had a moment to consider what she had done—the confrontation that she had so blithely initiated—before Ashley caught sight of her between the twining curls of iron and stopped in her tracks.
They stared at each other through the glass. Juniper bundled in a dusty winter coat and boots, and Ashley barefoot in a pair of high-waisted leggings and a sports bra to match. Winter and summer. Polar opposites. Strangers.
That could have been me, Juniper knew, and she couldn’t tell if she was recoiling because she loathed the thought or because she secretly wished for it.
At first Juniper worried that Ashley wouldn’t open the door at all, but then her shoulders squared and Ashley all but lunged across the space between them. Yanking one of the heavy doors wide, she growled, “What do you think you’re doing here?”
“Hi, Ash.” It popped out before Juniper could stop it. It was snide, but she felt her former best friend’s nickname pierce a forgotten place in her heart.
“Don’t you dare call me that. You have no right to call me that. I won’t ask again: What are you doing here?”
Juniper thought of her crappy, rusty car and the knife that had surely made quick work of the threadbare tires. She could almost picture it: bone-handled, custom-made. Perhaps Ashley used it to segment pomegranates for her post-workout smoothie bowl. “Why did you do it?”
“Do what, June? Go to your stupid library class? For your information, I didn’t even know you were back in town. And yeah, I probably should have left when I realized it was you, but you know what? I wanted to make you uncomfortable. I wanted you to squirm. I hope you hated every single minute of it, and you need to know I’ll do it again. And every week until you leave Jericho.”
A fleck of spittle hit Juniper on the cheek, but she didn’t move to wipe it away. “Why’d you slash my tires, Ashley?”
Some inscrutable emotion washed across Ashley’s features, but then she steeled her gaze and the moment was gone. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Really? Because I can’t think of a single person in Jericho who would be so spiteful.”
“Spiteful? Are you kidding me? You’re a despicable human being, June.”
That stung. “We were kids. Sullivan and I fell in love—”
“Your little affair was not love. Don’t cheapen my marriage, my life”—Ashley tapped her chest with her knuckles, hard—“by pretending that a few weeks one summer when you were a teenager was anything close to love.”
“It was an accident.”
“Oh, that’s rich. Do you mean that your secret relationship was an accident? Or that Willa was?”
Juniper recoiled as if she had been slapped.
“Thanks for that.” Ashley crossed her arms and gave Juniper a cold, tight smile. “If I had any questions about Willa’s parentage, I don’t anymore. The look on your face is all the proof I need.”
“Does Sullivan—”
“He’s willfully ignorant. And it’s for his own good. I can hardly stand to look at her. My children do not have a half sister.” Ashley gave a little shiver of revulsion.
Poor Willa. Blameless, naive, lovely little Willa. The line where “father” should be on her birth certificate had been intentionally left blank—a bitter tradition for the Baker girls—because June had confessed that in the weeks after the murders she had gone completely off the rails. She didn’t know who the father was. Didn’t want to know. Didn’t care. But that wasn’t true. There had only ever been one possible father, but because Juniper wanted to protect her daughter—and Sullivan and Ashley and, well, everyone—she bore her parents’ quiet shame. She would rather have them believe that she had slept with half the county than chain Sullivan to her when he had already let her go. The girl that June had been was hurt and reeling, and she had believed with the ingenuous certainty of a crushed nineteen-year-old that Willa would be better off without him. That they both would.
Of course, no one came forward. There wasn’t even the faintest whisper of who the father might be, and eventually people stopped wondering. June and Sullivan had hidden their relationship meticulously, making sure the only people who ever saw them together were their siblings. And none of them would ever come forward. Willa was the opposite of a virgin birth—she was anybody’s baby.
But Ashley’s derision changed everything. Juniper was suddenly, unshakably sure that she had made a terrible mistake. The thought shot through her like a bolt of electricity: Sullivan should know.