Chapter 357: Explain what, exactly?
Amara arrived in chaos, parents filing in and out, officers moving between rooms with clipboards, and, cutting above all of it, a boy’s voice raised in anger.
"You couldn’t just care about us for once? You had to make everything about you again?" Nolan was standing near the front desk, practically shouting at Justina, who stood there crying, arms wrapped around herself, saying nothing back.
It took Amara a moment to piece together what had actually happened that somehow, in the chaos and rumor of a police raid, the story had rearranged itself into something that had nothing to do with the truth.
Everyone at that station had apparently already decided Justina must have called it in again, the way she had the last time, and that assumption alone was quietly protecting her from any real consequence.
Though it earned her whispered nicknames like golden child, someone had already started calling her, half-admiring, half-resentful, while Nolan stood there taking his fear and embarrassment out on the one person in the room who’d actually done nothing wrong at all.
Amara crossed the lobby fast, ready to put herself bodily between her daughter and whatever this boy thought he was doing, when another voice cut through first.
"Nolan. What did you do this time?"
A man had just walked in, tall, composed even at this hour, moving through the chaos of the station with the particular ease of someone used to cleaning up other people’s messes. Nolan’s shoulders dropped immediately at the sound of his voice, all the fight going out of him at once.
"I didn’t do anything, I swear," Nolan said, quieter now, almost small.
The man turned toward Amara next, and something in his face familiar in a way that made her stomach drop before her mind had even caught up stopped her completely.
"I’m sorry, Mrs. Vale," he said.
Amara stood there, genuinely out of words, staring at a face she hadn’t seen in twelve years, trying to reconcile the man she remembered with the man standing in front of her now and trying, at the same time, to work out how on earth Sebastian Creed had ended up with a son old enough to be standing in a police station getting shouted at.
"Do you two know each other?" the officer nearby asked, glancing between them.
"Ah...yeah," Amara said, carefully, pulling Justina into her arms and holding on tight, mostly as an excuse not to have to say more than that just yet. "In the past."
"Nolan is Damien’s son," Sebastian said, quietly enough that it should have stayed private, though not quietly enough that the words carried further than he meant them to, and by the way several heads in the lobby turned.
Amara understood immediately that half the station, and by extension half the school, now knew something about Nolan that he’d clearly never wanted spoken out loud in a room full of strangers. "After he passed, I adopted him. I raised him myself."
Nolan’s jaw tightened, humiliation flashing plainly across his face before he could smooth it over, and Amara felt, despite everything, a flicker of sympathy for him that she didn’t have room to hold onto just then.
"Please," she said instead, turning back to Sebastian, her voice steadier than she felt, "keep your son away from my daughter."
She didn’t wait for a response. She wrapped an arm around Justina and walked her straight out of the station, past the officers, past Nolan, past twelve years of a life she hadn’t thought about in longer than she wanted to admit, standing right there in a police station lobby at almost one in the morning.
"I’m sorry, Mum," Justina said in the car, voice small, tears still tracking down her face. "I shouldn’t have been at that place."
"It’s okay, baby." Amara reached over and took her daughter’s hand, keeping her own voice soft even though her mind was somewhere else entirely. "We’ll talk when we get home."
They drove the rest of the way in silence, Justina eventually leaning her head against the window and closing her eyes, and Amara let her, grateful for the quiet, because the truth was she needed it too needed a few uninterrupted minutes to sit with the fact that seeing Sebastian again after all these years had done something to her she hadn’t asked for and didn’t have the first idea what to do with now.
Amara stood at the top of the stairs and watched Justina disappear into her room, the door clicking shut with none of its usual teenage force, just a quiet, tired sound that somehow worried Amara more than a slam would have.
She was still standing there when Josh’s door opened across the hall, his head appearing around the frame, watching his sister’s door for a moment before crossing the hall and slipping inside without knocking.
Amara didn’t stop him. Whatever he said to her in there, whatever quiet, economical comfort he had to offer, it would land better coming from him tonight than from her.
She found Julian already in bed, waiting, the lamp on low, and she climbed in beside him without bothering to change out of the clothes she’d worn to the station, too tired for the ritual of it.
"I met Sebastian today," she said quietly, once she was sure the kids’ doors were shut and the hallway was still.
"Apparently he raised Damien’s son after he passed. And this same boy is at the same school as Justina and Josh." She stared at the ceiling, not at Julian, because it was easier to say the next part that way.
"I want to transfer them. Both of them. To another school."
"Amara, come on." Julian’s voice was gentle, but there was a firmness underneath it too. "We can explain this to Justina. Tell her to stay away from him."
"Explain what, exactly?" She turned to face him now, something breaking loose in her voice that she’d been holding tight since the police station.
"That Sebastian and I had a past? That I wasn’t just in love with him for ten years, I was married to him, Julian, for seven of those years. And the whole time, it turns out I wasn’t his wife at all. I was his mistress, while he stayed married to his secretary, and I spent six years raising their daughter as my own without ever knowing she wasn’t mine." Her voice cracked on the last word, old grief finding its way to the surface faster than she’d expected.
"Is that what you want me to explain to my sixteen-year-old daughter?"