“I have two hundred head of cattle grazing the section just east of here. I’m checking fences before the snow gets too deep.”
It was ridiculous, but a part of Juniper wondered if he knew the moment she stepped foot on the acreage. Were they tied together somehow? Intrinsically bound by all that had happened that summer? Absolutely not. Sullivan’s explanation made perfect sense. Still, she knew that when she looked at him there were things she couldn’t say written in her eyes.
“Juniper Baker,” he said. And then smiled, shaking his head. He ran his knuckles against his jaw like he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it. “How have you been?”
As if they were old friends. As if they could just laugh and chat in this dusty, decrepit building like they were swapping stories over coffee and cherry pie at Cunningham’s. Juniper could rattle off five reasons why they should both leave now and pretend this unexpected meeting had never happened at all. Ashley was at the very top of the list. Juniper thought of Ashley’s glare, her ugly words at the library. Jericho would have another murder to solve if Ashley could see her husband and former best friend right now. Juniper’s stomach flipped and her mouth went dry.
“Fine. I’ve been fine.”
“I heard about Jonathan,” he said. Sullivan sounded genuinely upset, and that more than anything pierced her. Everything that she had been tamping down, pressing deep into a place where she promised to deal with it later, came bubbling up. Not just Jonathan’s accident and the possibility that she might never speak to her brother again. Willa, and Juniper’s fierce desire to have her daughter back. What happened to the Murphys, who were like family. The uncertainty and rejection Juniper felt, the loneliness of being so far away from all that she had once known and loved. And, of course, there was Sullivan. Fifteen years later, and she still wanted him. She wanted to press her face against his warm skin. To trace the well-known and totally unfamiliar angles of his body and recapture those long summer nights when everything seemed so uncomplicated and pure.
But that was an illusion shattered by the events of that summer. Nothing about that time had been uncomplicated. Nothing had been pure. It was messy and messed up, a summer that didn’t change the rancid heart of a hard community; it merely exposed it for what it was. Even if Juniper didn’t know exactly what happened, she could close her eyes and feel the sickening pitch of her stomach as she came face-to-face with each difficult truth. There was darkness in Jericho. And this moment was a lie. Sullivan and her. Talking as if they were friends. They were strangers, not lovers. They were nothing to each other.
“I need to go.”
Sullivan didn’t move. “Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not okay! Nothing about this”—she gave her arm a jerky wave, encompassing the farm and Jonathan and Jericho itself in the gesture—“is okay.”
“Is he going to make it?”
She wrapped her arms around herself and studied Sullivan for a long while. He didn’t flinch beneath her gaze. Yet Juniper couldn’t find even a hint of the cocky swagger that had characterized him all those years ago. Gone was the sly smile, the twinkle in his eye that made her feel like he knew all her secrets. The boy that he had been would have been cracking jokes by now, pushing her up against the counter and kissing her slow. Inviting her to forget that anything at all existed outside of the circle of their embrace. This new Sullivan, this man she didn’t know, looked sad, his eyes lined with worry.
“We’re not sure,” Juniper said finally. Simply. There was nothing else to say.
“I’m so sorry.”
Juniper took him to mean he was sorry about Jonathan, but there were a dozen other things he could be apologizing for. Still, Juniper wasn’t entirely guiltless herself. The last thing he said to her that summer was: “I would have married you.” Maybe she should apologize, too.
Instead she said, “We’re hoping for the best.” It was such a clichéd thing to say, but all at once Juniper was tired all the way down to her bones. She could have curled up on the floor of the roadside stand and slept with her head on the hard ground. “I really should go.”
“Me too.” Sullivan nodded. And yet he still stood blocking the door. “It’s good to see you.”
Juniper had been so good. She had done all the things they wanted her to do. She didn’t talk about that summer. She had the baby and handed Willa to her mother. She went to college and moved away and didn’t come back—partly because she didn’t want to and partly because she knew she wasn’t welcome anymore. Juniper was too broken, too complicated for quiet, orderly Jericho. And all at once she wanted to be the troublemaker they all believed her to be.