She knew exactly what her mother meant. Jonathan had been unshakable, unassailable, charmed. Bulletproof. He could have survived anything—and did. But none of that mattered as the truth of Reb’s words slowly snapped into place. “You were going to leave Lawrence.”
Her mother clapped a hand over her mouth and gave Juniper an anguished look.
Of course. Of course she was going to leave him. She had packed a suitcase, said goodbye in a dozen different ways. She had been composing again, but it wasn’t a tribute to her daughter, it was a song of farewell. To her husband of nineteen years. Her family. Her life.
“Why?”
Reb laughed, but it was brief and hollow. “Why do you think? I wasn’t in love with him. I’m not sure I ever was. He swooped in and saved me at a point in my life when I desperately needed not to be alone, but gratitude and love are not the same thing. I thought he knew that. We were never supposed to be forever.”
Juniper tested those words, put a little weight on them and found out they held. She had always known that Law loved her mother more than Reb loved him back, but no relationship was balanced—someone was always pursuing, the other pushing away. Honestly, Juniper had never seen her parents’ marriage as anything other than practical. They were kind and loyal, respectful as coworkers. But was there a spark? Something raw and sacred?
Juniper wanted to say: What about us? What about her and Jonathan, the family that they had built? But instead she asked: “Why didn’t you go?”
“He found out. I don’t really even know how. I covered my steps so carefully…” Reb reached for her mug of tea, took a sip out of habit.
“I found your suitcase,” Juniper admitted, almost against her will.
“You did?”
“It was an accident. I popped the trunk of your car. You didn’t do a very good job of hiding it.”
Her mother sighed. “Maybe I wanted to be caught. When I think about it now… What was I going to do? Forty-one years old and starting over from scratch. I didn’t go to college, never learned a trade. I cooked and cleaned. I gardened and sewed. I was a homemaker. If I would have left my home, what would I have been?” She didn’t answer her own question, but it hung in the air between them all the same: nothing.
But Juniper didn’t believe that. She had forgotten that Rebecca was only forty-one that summer, not much older than Juniper was now. Young and lovely and full of life. She was an artist and composer, a smart, strong woman in her prime. She could have started over, forged a new life far away from the drudgery of a small Iowa farm and a man almost twenty years her senior.
“I wasn’t leaving you,” her mother said quietly. “I’d never leave you or Jonathan if you needed me. But you were almost adults. I didn’t think it would ruin you if your parents divorced. It’s not like I was just going to disappear.”
“What happened?”
Reb put both hands around the clay mug and held on tight. “We fought. Of course. I was playing the Braga, and he wanted to talk. So we… scuffled. The body of the cello was cracked in the process.”
Juniper wasn’t sure what to say. She knew how much that instrument meant to her mother. But she had to stay focused on the main thing. She wasn’t here to talk about her parents’ marriage. This was about Cal and Beth. “And Law broke his foot?”
“Not then. I convinced him to go to the Pattersons’ party, but it didn’t help. He was still so angry.”
Juniper could picture the look in Law’s eyes as he steered her mother out of the Pattersons’ backyard. But the story was starting to collapse beneath the weight of unspoken details, of things that she was struggling to understand. It had been an exhausting day, and it took her eyes a moment to focus after she blinked.
“Mom,” she said, hating herself a little for fast-forwarding to the information she sought, “I still don’t get it. How did Law break his foot?”
“Why does it matter?” Reb couldn’t keep a note of bitterness out of her voice.
“I don’t know!” Juniper didn’t mean to yell, and instantly tempered her tone. “Look, it just does. Cal and Beth were killed that night, and Jonathan sat in a jail cell without you nearby. I was escorted in a police cruiser to the station for questioning, and because I was just nineteen years old, I didn’t even know that I could have refused to go with them. You weren’t there when we needed you the most, and to this day I don’t know why.”