JOSIE
Her first season working as an intern for the show had been the kind of season where everything went wrong. And since it had been her first year, she’d had no perspective on it. Josie had thought that things like the set catching on fire, and the costume department going on strike, and a stomach flu—the kind that created explosive diarrhea—burning its way through the cast were all normal.
She’d met every problem with the grim determination to control it. The way she couldn’t control any other thing.
Every season after that first season had been easier—which might be a part of why she stayed.
The rest of the night that Cameron came back to the Riverview was like that. After the shock of seeing him, the painful gut-clenching reaction to his obvious inability to look her in the eye, it wasn’t so bad.
When he walked away from the table and grabbed his things, clearly leaving, it hadn’t even registered in the atmosphere of shock in her brain.
When he and Max walked back in like nothing was really wrong, she didn’t know what to feel.
Relief? Dread?
So she used the great coping mechanism she always used.
She worked.
She cleared the dishes the squirrel had upset. She brought out new place settings. New silverware. When the oven timer went off and fresh bread was baked, she took care of it. Brought it out, sliced and wrapped in the cloth napkins that fresh bread was always wrapped in here at the Riverview.
She filled water glasses.
“Sit,” Helen urged when Josie jumped up to go grab a bottle of wine. “I’ll get it.”
But Josie was already halfway to the kitchen.
The kitchen was still dark and quiet. The smell of the dinner Alice had worked so hard on lingered, and the pots and pans were piled up, waiting for whichever family members were on the clean-up crew to come in and take care of them and probably another bottle of wine. Or two.
They’d bring Cameron in here and make him sit at the counter and not lift a finger as he told them more stories about his travels.
Out in the dining room it was a regular story time.
And she wanted to listen to every word and ask seven hundred follow-up questions.
You traveled with a Mongolian nomadic tribe for a month?
What does yak blood taste like?
What did you make for Prince Harry and Meghan?
Why were you arrested in France?
Did you miss us?
Did I ever cross your mind?
But the obvious answer to those last two questions was no.
The swinging door to the dining room opened as Josie took two bottles of white wine from the fridge. For the second her back was turned to the door, she foolishly hoped the footsteps belonged to Cameron.
“Josie.” It was Helen. Looking pregnant and contrite. Josie had a million things she could yell, but she swallowed them and smiled.
“I’ve got the wine,” she said, like she didn’t understand what Helen wanted.
“I’m sorry,” Helen whispered.
“For what?”
Helen shook her head and crossed the dark kitchen toward Josie.
“I’m just getting the wine,” Josie said, and she sidestepped Helen as she reached out.
“I thought it would be happy,” Helen said. “The two of you back here like this. I thought…”
What? He’d forgiven me? I’d forgotten him?
“Are you happy?” Josie asked, the words coming out harder than she’d intended. Meaner. It was like a crack in the wall, and the rest of her darker feelings rushed her, clamoring to be let out. Words she’d never said wanted to be said. Things she hardly remembered feeling.
“No.” Helen said, looking like the guiltiest, saddest pregnant girl who ever lived.
And it only made Josie angrier.
Josie stood still under the force of what she wanted to say. Scream at her cousin and best friend.
“You were both so young and you’ve both gone on to do such amazing things and you never…you never talk about him and he never talks about you and I thought…” Helen sighed. “I thought it would be happy.”
Through the swinging door came a roar of laughter.
“Stop!” Alice shrieked. “You’re making that up!”
“I’m serious,” Cameron said, and there was more laughter.
“It is happy,” she told Helen.
But she knew at once that she wasn’t going back in there. She’d take the farm truck back to her parents’ place and…she didn’t know past that.
Work?
Leave?
Hide?
“Take these to the table, would you?” She handed the wine bottles to Helen.
“Where are you going?”
“Back to my parents’.”
“But—” Helen looked over her shoulder at the door, the family and happiness on the other side.
“Tell them I got a work call,” Josie said. They’d believe it. And it wasn’t even a lie. Her phone had been buzzing in her pocket all night.
She grabbed her keys from the hook by the door, and without even her winter coat, stepped outside into the brittle cold and made her escape.