Chapter 348: A worried mum
"No, Mum."
"I’ll drive myself."
"Justina..."
"I’m in college now."
"I know." Amara smiled warmly. "But you’re still my baby." Justina stared at her for a long second. "Mum..." She rubbed her forehead dramatically.
"You sound like you’re speaking a completely different language." Amara laughed. "What does that mean?"
"It means I’m not five anymore."
"I can drive."
"I have my own schedule."
"And I promise I’ll survive one trip to campus without parental supervision." She reached for her car keys. "Oh, and don’t even think about picking me up after class."
"Why not?"
"Because if you do..." Justina pointed a finger at her mother. "...I’ll tell Daddy you’ve been spying on me again." Amara blinked.
"What?"
"I do not spy on you."
"Really?" Justina folded her arms.
"I know you went through my phone last night." Amara froze.
"And my laptop."
"..."
"You waited until I was asleep."
"..."
"So don’t bother trying again."
"I changed all my passwords this morning." Amara cleared her throat.
"I wasn’t spying."
"I was..."
"Worried." Justina gave her a look that clearly said, Same difference. Amara walked closer.
"Baby, did you hear the news this morning?" Justina sighed.
"Mum..."
"A teenager took her own life."
"And another girl disappeared after meeting someone she’d been talking to online."
"The world isn’t the same anymore."
"There are drugs."
"Kidnappers."
"People pretending to be someone they’re not."
"I don’t check your phone because I don’t trust you." She reached out and brushed a strand of hair behind Justina’s ear. "I check because I don’t trust the world."
"I just want to protect you." For a moment, Justina’s expression softened.
"I know."
"But you can’t protect me from everything." She glanced at the clock.
"I’m really going to be late." She leaned forward and kissed Amara’s cheek. "I love you."
"I love you too."
"Come straight home after school, okay?"
"I’ll be studying with Lucy."
"That’s fine."
"You can both come here."
"We’ll see." Before Amara could say another word, Justina had already slipped out of the room. The sound of her footsteps faded down the hallway. Then came the front door.
Silence. Amara stood there for a long moment. She knew she should leave. She really should. Instead... Her eyes drifted to the closed laptop on the desk. She walked over and lifted the lid.
The login screen appeared. Password required. A small smile escaped her. "She really changed it." Amara closed the laptop again. Her gaze wandered around the room.
That was when she noticed a leather-bound diary tucked beneath a stack of notebooks. She picked it up. It wasn’t locked. Her fingers rested on the cover. One page.
That’s all it would take. She could open it. Make sure her daughter was okay. Find out if there was something Justina wasn’t telling her. Her thumb slipped beneath the cover. Then she stopped. Amara closed her eyes.
"I trust my daughter," she whispered to herself. The words felt more like a reminder than a certainty. Carefully, she placed the diary back exactly where she had found it. Some lines... Even a mother had to choose not to cross.
Amara stood in the hallway for a moment, the house settling into its mid-morning quiet JJ off to school on the bus she’d fought for, Josh already gone in his spotless car, Justina hiding things..
Three children. Three completely different kinds of worry.
Amara made her way back down the grand staircase, past the wall of photographs, past the years that had thinned Julian out of frame by frame, and told herself, the way she told herself most mornings now, that she was probably overreacting.
She was usually wrong about that too.
—-
Amara got dressed for work, running a comb through her hair with one hand while she scrolled for Julian’s contact with the other. She hit call and put the phone on speaker, propping it against the mirror as she clipped her earrings in.
"How are you doing, baby?" she asked when he picked up.
"I’m sorry, before you start talking, I’m coming home tonight. The deal is closing. I’ll be home soon."
"Alright, baby." She smiled despite herself, the small easy relief of it loosening something in her shoulders. "How are you doing? How are you holding up?"
"Badly, as always," Julian said, and there was a tiredness in his voice that had become so familiar over the years she almost didn’t register it as tiredness anymore, just the sound of her husband.
"I miss you. I miss the kids. This whole thing has taken more out of me than it should have."
"I need to speak to you about Justina," Amara said, the words coming out faster than she meant them to, like she’d been holding them since she left the girl’s bedroom that morning.
"Alright, my love." A pause, some shuffling on his end a door, a car, she couldn’t tell. "I’ll be leaving for the airport soon. We’ll talk properly tonight, I promise. I want to hear all of it."
He blew her a kiss down the line, the way he’d done since they were young, and it had made her laugh, and it still did, a little, even now. Amara smiled and ended the call.
She got to the office a little before nine. Piers Corporation took up eleven floors of glass and steel in the heart of the financial district, and Amara had long since stopped feeling strange about the fact that half of it existed because of decisions she’d made in rooms much smaller than the ones she worked in now.
She had three meetings before eleven, a lunch she ate at her desk between calls, and a two o’clock with the board that ran twenty minutes over because two directors couldn’t agree on a number that, in the end, barely mattered.
By four, she had closed out everything that needed closing.
"Ma’am, Mr. Singh wants this signed," her assistant said, appearing at her office door with a folder held out like an offering.
"I need to leave, Adele. Tell him tomorrow."
"Tomorrow you won’t be at Piers Corporation," Adele reminded her, gently, the way she reminded Amara of most things Amara was too tired to remember herself. "You’ll be at Ara Clothing."
Amara paused, hand already reaching for her bag. "Okay, great, bring it there. I’ll sign it in the morning. I need to leave."