She started to think again about that long-ago night when Michael Campion wasn’t a client anymore. They’d talked about their love and how hopeless it all was.
Michael had playfully tugged at the little braid hanging down the back of her neck.
“I have an idea,” he said. “A way for us to be together.”
“I’d do anything,” she’d said. “Anything.”
“Me too,” Michael had said.
It was a pledge.
They’d made plans over the next few weeks, plans that would take place six months in the future. And one night when everything was in place, Michael left her house and just disappeared. Three months later, someone called the police saying he’d seen Michael at her house. And then the police had come and she’d gotten confused and made up a story — and talked herself into a huge mess.
It had been hell: jail and the trial and especially not being able to get mail or phone calls. But she’d known he would wait for her. And if she’d been convicted, he would have come forward. But Junie had hung in, used the brains and the lawyer God had given her, and played her role to the hilt.
And thank you, God, she’d been acquitted.
Three days ago she’d taken the blood and hair he’d sent her and put it into that letter to Yuki Castellano. Now the hard part was over and Junie was traveling light. She had worn boy’s clothes on the bus from San Francisco to Vancouver, the flight to Mexico City, and now she was on another plane, on her way to a little village on a beach in Costa Rica.
This remote and enchanted place would be their new home, and Junie Moon hoped with her whole being that someday Michael’s heart would be fixed and that paradise would last for-fricking-ever.
She’d changed into a cute little sundress in the bathroom, fluffed up her newly straightened dark brown hair, put on the chic cat’s-eye glasses. The wheels of the plane bounced on the landing strip and all the passengers began to clap. Junie clapped, too, as the plane rolled to a stop.
Moments later the cabin door opened and Junie stepped carefully down the steps that had been wheeled up to the aircraft. Junie scanned the many faces peering out at the plane from the small outdoor terminal.
And there he was.
He’d shaven his head, had grown a goatee, and he was brown all over from the sun. He was wearing a bright striped shirt and cutoffs, grinning and waving, calling, “Baby, baby, over here!”
No one would ever recognize him, no one but her.
This was her real life.
And it was starting now.