Chapter 10 - Sunshine on June
A year later, the kitchen of the white-shingled bungalow on the south side of town smelled of lemon zest, vanilla bean, and hot sugar.
It was eleven o'clock on a Saturday morning in late June.
The heat outside was ninety degrees, but inside Gwen’s house, two window air conditioning units hummed a steady, vibrating bass note that kept the kitchen as cool as an apple cellar.
Bethany stood by the counter, an offset spatula in her hand, carefully smoothing a layer of pale yellow buttercream over a round, two-tiered sponge cake.
She looked transformed. Her hair was cut into a sharp, chin-length bob that showed the clean line of her neck, and the gray exhaustion that had lived under her eyes for three years had been replaced by a soft, healthy color. She wore a simple white linen sundress and red canvas sneakers.
On the kitchen table sat a small cardboard box containing fifteen small, hand-painted sugar sunflowers she had spent three days making.
“If you drop one, Gwen,” Bethany warned without looking up from her frosting, “I am charging you Minneapolis prices. Five dollars a petal.”
“I’m an auditor, Bethany,” Gwen said from the breakfast nook, where she was meticulously folding yellow paper napkins into triangles. “I don't drop assets. Ask your mother’s former foundation board.”
Bethany let out a short, clean laugh—a sound that was bright, easy, and completely free of shadows.
The legal dust had settled six months earlier.
Darlene Vance had pleaded guilty to one count of third-degree theft by deception and one count of simple assault. The judge, an old classmate of Grandma Edith’s from the state bar association, had spared her state prison due to her age, sentencing her instead to two years of supervised probation, five hundred hours of community service at the county landfill recycling center, and full restitution of the eight thousand four hundred dollars—which had been returned to my private checking account with eight percent interest.
Grandma Edith had dissolved *Vance & Miller Properties* entirely, selling the commercial holdings to an agricultural cooperative in Des Moines and placing the residential duplexes into a blind educational trust for June and Bethany’s future children.
Darlene now lived in a one-bedroom apartment in a retirement complex forty miles east, her days spent within the five-hundred-yard boundary set by the permanent restraining order. She was no longer on the historical society. Her name had been removed from the park committee. The six-foot bronze statue of Lucy had never been cast; instead, the city council had used the state-recovered funds to plant a grove of twenty-two white oak trees along the riverbank, with a single, unadorned stone marker that read simply: *For All Our Children.*
Wade was living in Cedar Falls, working as a draftsman for an engineering firm.
He paid his child support on the first of every month via direct state withholding—Rachel had ensured there would be no "administrative errors" with his payments. Every other Saturday, he drove forty minutes to the community center in Waterloo to sit in a beige room with a social worker named Mrs. Gable, where he played with wooden blocks and read picture books to June for one hundred and twenty minutes.
He was quiet during those visits. He didn't ask about me. He didn't mention his mother. He looked at June like a man looking through a thick sheet of glass at a garden he had burned down with his own hands.
“Maren,” Bethany called out, turning from the counter with the spatula held high. “Is the guest of honor awake?”
From the back bedroom, the sound of rhythmic, energetic thumping began against the mattress of the crib.
“She’s been awake for twenty minutes,” I said, walking into the hallway with a laundry basket of clean baby clothes. “She was just waiting for the frosting to be finished.”
I walked into the bedroom.
June stood in the corner of her crib, holding onto the top rail with two fat, dimpled hands, bouncing on her heels with pure, chaotic toddler energy. She was twelve months old today. Her hair had come in thick and golden-brown, curling in wild, damp ringlets around her ears, and her eyes were a bright, unclouded blue—my mother’s eyes.
“Morning, June-bug,” I said, scooping her up into my arms.
She immediately jammed her sticky, warm hand against my left cheek, her fingers patting the skin with enthusiastic, clumsy affection.
The skin beneath her fingers was smooth.
The purple mark had faded within six weeks, leaving no scar, no indent, no physical sign that Darlene’s sapphire had ever touched me. What had remained was something much more durable: an unshakeable, bone-deep certainty about who I was and what I was willing to burn down to protect the life I had built.
I had taken a full-time position as the director of digital learning at the college in the spring, with a salary that covered our rent on a lovely, sun-filled two-bedroom flat three blocks from Gwen’s house, with enough left over to start June’s college fund in an account that required two signatures—mine and Rachel’s.
I carried June into the bright yellow kitchen.
Bethany turned around, holding the finished cake on a white ceramic stand.
It was beautiful. The ivory frosting was textured like linen, surrounded at the base by Bethany’s sugar sunflowers, catching the late morning sun that streamed through Gwen’s spotless windows.
Across the top tier, written in smooth, golden-yellow piped script, was a single word:
*JUNE.*
Not *Welcome Home*. Not *In Loving Memory*. Not a memorial to a past that had broken people, nor an apology for a grief that had been weaponized.
Just her name.
Large, bold, and golden under the summer sun.
June saw it, let out an ecstatic, high-pitched screech that made Aunt Gwen cover her ears with a folded napkin, and reached forward with both hands, lunging toward the frosting.
“Wait, wait!” Bethany laughed, holding the cake just out of reach while Gwen grabbed the camera from the counter. “Let her blow out the candle first!”
“She’s one, Bethany,” Gwen said, adjusting her glasses as she framed the shot through the lens. “She doesn't blow. She grabs.”
“Let her grab,” I said, pressing my face into the warm, sweet-smelling curve of June’s neck as she laughed, her little feet kicking against my ribs in absolute, unfettered joy. “It’s her cake.”
May you like
Gwen pressed the shutter.
The camera clicked—a clean, sharp, final sound—capturing the yellow sunlight, the laughter of three women who had survived the winter, and the little girl who would never have to ask anyone for her own name again.
