Mr. Crawford stood, too, effectively blocking Willa’s path to the door until she looked him in the eye. “I want you to know that if you change your mind,” he told her, “you can come back here anytime. You have a get-out-of-jail-free card today, courtesy of me. We can call your mom and she’ll come right back for you.”
Juniper stood and nodded. “I’ll turn my ringer on high.”
“Sometimes it takes a bit for our bodies to catch up with our minds, Willa,” Mr. Crawford continued. “You know what happened this morning, but you haven’t processed it yet. That’s okay. Just be sure to let us know if you start feeling not like yourself.”
Willa stared at her feet, thumbs hooked on the straps of her backpack and jaw tilted away from Juniper as if she couldn’t bear to even acknowledge her presence. “Mmm-hmm,” she muttered. “Can I go now?”
Mr. Crawford stepped back and swept his hand toward the door. Willa all but scurried away, not sparing Juniper a single glance on her way out.
When the door had snapped shut—just a degree shy of a slam—Juniper couldn’t stop the heavy sigh that escaped her lips.
“She’s thirteen,” Henry reminded her.
“She hates me.”
“No she doesn’t. She just doesn’t know how to be around you. You’ve been gone for a long time, June.”
Why did everyone feel the need to remind her of her absence? It was as if the whole of Jericho was keeping tabs. “Thank you for your help,” Juniper said, choosing to ignore Henry’s comment. “Please call me if she changes her mind.”
“Of course.”
In the parking lot, Juniper banged her head softly against the steering wheel. Mr. Crawford was right—Willa’s body hadn’t caught up to what her mind had just been forced to acknowledge, and neither had Juniper’s. But she was starting to feel it now. The high flutter in her chest, the prick of impending doom that twitched spider legs down her spine. Her therapist had taught her how to calm herself years ago, how to lean into the panic and count to ten. Inhale the future, exhale the past. But that was all a load of crap, wasn’t it? Juniper couldn’t exhale the past. It was catching up with her, circling her neck with strong fingers, choking her. Good thing she had become quite adept at living breathlessly.
Juniper’s first meeting with Willa wasn’t what she’d hoped it would be at all. She hadn’t even gotten to touch her daughter, much less wrap her in the hug that Juniper’s arms were aching to give.
Seeing her daughter in Mr. Crawford’s office had been a sobering reality check. Still, like it or not, Willa was moving in with her, so Juniper did the only thing she knew to do and drove to her parents’ farm. Of course, the least disruptive solution was for Juniper to just move into the farmhouse with Willa, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. In a way, she was getting exactly what she wanted—her daughter under the same roof—in the worst, most unimaginable way.
The door was unlocked, of course, and she helped herself to sheets from the linen closet, a faded quilt, and a lumpy feather pillow that had seen better days. The futon in the spare room of the bungalow would work in a pinch, and though Juniper wanted to set up Willa’s room with things that would make her feel comfortable and at home, she didn’t dare to enter the inner sanctum of her daughter’s bedroom. Never mind that it was Juniper’s old room and that her fingerprints surely crisscrossed every square inch. What she saw as unimpeachable, Willa would surely consider the gravest of sins.
But Juniper had already done her worst, even if she’d never been charged with any of it: perjury, obstruction of justice, trespass, abandonment. Was it treason to turn against your own flesh and blood? To wonder—even secretly, silently—if everything she believed to be true about her life was a lie? Juniper stood in her mother’s kitchen with old bedding clutched to her chest and wished that she could click her heels together and go back to a time before everything fell apart. Before there was blood blooming from Cal’s chest and spilled on the ground. Staining her fingers.
That kind of wistful magic didn’t exist. But maybe the secrets she had buried in the Iowa soil were just now bearing bitter fruit. Maybe all she had to do was take a scythe and harvest the truth. Hold it, firm and heavy, irrefutable in the palm of her hand.
As Juniper slipped back into her car, outfitted with the barest essentials for turning the bungalow into a home for two, her phone buzzed in her pocket.