As horrifying as Max Bascombe’s murder-and Collette’s disappearance-had been, they had made her doubt the version of events that everyone she knew had been so quick to embrace; that Oliver had simply gotten cold feet and vanished. Julianna hated the fact that she had initially embraced this as truth.
She ought to have known better. Julianna was not a fool; she had sensed his hesitation, and she understood it. How could she not? No one in the world knew him the way she did. But if Oliver had changed his mind about getting married, he would never have let her find out at the altar.
They’d known each other most of their lives, but had only become friends during freshman year of high school, when they’d been partnered up in biology lab. Julianna had always thought Oliver was cute, but he was such a boy, and she didn’t have time for the foolishness of boys when she was younger. Older guys intrigued her then, because she had been such a serious girl, a brooding poetess, scribbling her heart’s every yearning and ache by candlelight in her bedroom. She had always been close to her father and their conversations around the dinner table had made her a thoughtful, opinionated child with a deep appreciation for a good debate.
Her poetry was private and full of all of the parts of her that her father would not have understood, never having been an adolescent girl. Her mother had tried to nurture her relationship with her daughter through “girls only” shopping trips and special dinners for just the two of them when Julianna’s father was out of town, but the bond between father and daughter had been different. They’d always been at ease in one another’s company.
When she and Oliver had become friends, that first year of high school, Julianna knew she had found the only other person in the world she had ever felt that way around. He understood how private her poetry was and never pressed her to read it, but whenever she allowed him to, he would look at her as though she’d given him some kind of gift. She had admired his closeness with his sister, who was off at college but came home to visit frequently.
Oliver had been one of the cutest boys in their class and friendly to everyone, but he and Julianna had become a clique all their own. But their friendship had not grown into anything more, which astonished everyone they knew. Instead, they advised each other on every crush and flirtation through the first two years of high school. She liked that Oliver never seemed to want the girls who wanted him. He preferred interesting to pretty, and focused on juniors and seniors, the same way Julianna herself did with the boys.
It was only much later that she came to wonder if they had both been concentrating on people who were beyond their reach in order to avoid falling in love with anyone else.
At the end of sophomore year, Oliver had appeared in his first play. He had always loved drama and music and Julianna had encouraged him to audition. His father had dismissed his interest in theater as an unnecessary distraction. Football would have been fine, but theater, somehow, did not fit Max Bascombe’s image of the young man he wanted his son to become.
Oliver might have auditioned to spite him, or because Julianna would not leave him alone about it, but once he was cast in the play-a production of 42nd Street -his motives became pure. He had simply loved the magic of the stage, the freedom of transforming into someone else.
Julianna understood. Her poetry provided her a similar freedom.
The show was performed half a dozen times. Collette came all the way home from Boston College to see her little brother on stage, but Oliver’s father never managed to attend.
After the last performance, Julianna had gone backstage and found Oliver standing in the wings by himself. He did not mention his father’s absence, but she saw the hurt in his eyes.
She’d held him then.
Nothing was the same after that night.
They spent their junior and senior years lost in each other, physically and emotionally, happy to make their classmates’ predictions come true. Somehow, rather than suffering from the intensity of their relationship, their grades actually improved. The future was important to both of them.
And it had almost ruined them.
The summer after their graduation from high school had been the saddest time of Julianna’s life. She and Oliver had stayed together, but their every kiss and touch had been bittersweet. They had agreed that they had to pursue their own paths, that they would be doing a disservice to themselves and each other if they did not reach for their dreams.
Oliver had gone to Yale, in Connecticut. Julianna had attended Stanford, all the way across the country, in California. Surrendering to logic, they had promised one another that if, when college was through, they were both single, they would be together again, but that there would be no promises in the meanwhile. It was only practical.
At Yale, Oliver had followed the pre-law curriculum and spent all four years in the Drama Club, fulfilling his father’s plan for him while still following his own heart. At Stanford, Julianna had fallen for a California guy two years older than she was. All of the anguish and drama of her poetry came alive in that relationship. He turned out to be shallow and callous, and forced her to wonder how she could be so wrong about someone.
The asshole went to Stanford Law. Julianna refused to follow him there. When she learned Oliver would be attending Yale Law School, she knew that she had to go as well. Older and wiser, she knew that the intimacy she’d shared with Oliver was a rare thing. To have such passion with someone, combined with an abiding trust, was so precious that only a fool would surrender it willingly.
They had a chance to make up for a terrible mistake they had made four years earlier. Julianna had never been much of a believer in destiny, but could not deny that it felt as though they had always been meant to be together.
She still felt that way.
Ted Halliwell needed to find Oliver because he wanted answers, and he wanted to go home. Julianna wanted those things as well, but what Halliwell did not understand was that, to her, finding Oliver was going home. The lunacy and horror that had intruded upon their lives had made her question her faith in Oliver, but she was beyond that now. She still had questions, but no longer had doubts.
All she really wanted was to be reunited with him. Everything else was secondary.
Halliwell had different priorities.
But to find Oliver, to survive in this place, she and the detective were going to have to work together. At first that had seemed obvious and natural, but now she had begun to grow concerned. Halliwell had cooled to her. She felt it. The truth was, they had been fellow travelers before, working together. Not friends. And Julianna was no fool. Halliwell knew where her loyalties were, and whose side she would be on if he had any conflict with Oliver when they caught up to him.
Yet they had to travel together. They had only each other to rely on.
Julianna shuddered and hugged herself tightly. The night had grown cold with the wind whipping across the top of the plateau, but there had been nothing they could do about it. She wished she had not left her jacket behind. That had been foolish.
She watched the golden light of the sun spread across the sky. Soon it would reach her, warm her, and the air would begin to heat up. Halliwell would stir.
During the night, she had woken several times and felt a rising spark of hope that she would find herself back in her world, in a place that made sense and followed the rules that she understood.