Chapter 358: Ashes from the past
"Not like that," Julian said quickly, reaching for her hand. "Not the whole thing, not now. Maybe when she’s older, you tell her all of it. Right now you just tell her Nolan is trouble. That’s enough."
"I’m not ashamed of my past." Amara said it firmly, the way she’d said it to herself a hundred times over the years until she’d finally believed it.
"My only mistake was not knowing. Seven years, and I never knew. But my daughter won’t understand that the way I’ve made peace with it, she’ll hear that Sebastian was before you, and she’ll go looking for whatever that means to her, and how does that play out, Julian? A boy she already likes, and his father turns out to be the man her mother was married to before she ever met her own father. How is that not a story she’ll want to pull at?"
Julian was quiet for a moment, clearly turning it over, and then pulled her in against his chest, one hand smoothing slowly over her hair the way he’d done since long before either of them had children old enough to complicate things like this.
"Calm down, baby. We’ll fix this, okay? It doesn’t need to come to transferring them, not yet. And we’ve been over this before you did absolutely nothing wrong. Seb was a jerk. That’s on him, not you. It was always going to be on him."
Amara let herself sink into him, into the familiar solidness of his arms, the particular safety of being held by someone who’d said this same reassurance to her enough times over the years that she almost, almost believed it fully by now.
"I know," she said quietly, against his chest. "I know that up here." She tapped two fingers lightly against her own temple.
"It’s just seeing him tonight, after twelve years, standing in a police station like no time had passed at all. It did something to me I wasn’t ready for."
"What kind of something?" Julian asked carefully, and there was the smallest edge underneath the question, the specific, quiet vigilance of a husband who’d learned, over enough years, exactly which old names deserved watching.
"Not what you’re thinking," Amara said, tilting her head up to look at him, wanting him to see it plainly on her face.
"I’m long over all the pain he put us through, but I can’t stand the idea of having anything to do with that family.." She paused, trying to find the right shape for it.
"It’s more like grief, maybe. For the version of me that went through all that because of him. I thought I’d buried it a long time ago. Tonight just dug it back up for a minute."
Julian pressed a kiss to the top of her head and said nothing for a while, just held her, letting the silence do what words couldn’t quite manage.
"We’ll figure out Justina," he said finally. "Together. However, we need to."
"Together," Amara agreed, closing her eyes, though sleep, when it finally came, was slower to arrive than either of them would have liked, both of them still turning the night over long after the lamp went dark.
Down the hall, behind a closed door, Josh sat cross-legged on the end of his sister’s bed while Justina cried quietly into her pillow, saying almost nothing, offering no advice, no lecture about the boy or the party or any of it just staying there, present, the way he always did when it actually mattered, until she finally fell asleep.
"Mum looks worse than you do right now, you know that." Josh stood in the doorway of Justina’s room the next morning, arms crossed, none of the usual teasing in his voice.
"You imagine how she felt, picking up her baby from a police station. Twice." He shook his head.
"You’re smarter than this, Justina. You’re not like any normal teenager who makes irrational teenage decisions. Why would you skip school for a party just to prove you’re cool?"
"Get out," Justina said, not looking at him, still curled up on top of her covers in yesterday’s clothes.
"That’s because you’ve never loved anyone," she added, sharper now, sitting up to glare at him properly.
"Love." Josh said the word slowly, like he was testing its weight.
"That’s a big word for a sixteen-year-old. You don’t know what love is. Love is Mum and Dad. Maybe, if you grow up, you’ll find something like what they have. Not some school boy who doesn’t even know what his own future looks like, or how to feed himself without a dining hall."
He paused at the door, and for a second the sharpness in his voice softened into something closer to actual worry. "I hope you get better. Think through your decisions. Not trying to be mean. Just saying."
He left before she could throw anything back at him, and Justina sat alone in the quiet for a long time after, hating that some small, stubborn part of her suspected he might be right.
Julian found Justina downstairs later in the afternoon, sitting alone at the kitchen island, and pulled out the stool beside her without asking.
"Do you like Nolan?" he asked, no preamble, watching her face carefully.
"No," Justina said, too fast, the lie sitting oddly in her mouth even as it left it. She hadn’t meant to lie the word had just come out that way, some instinct in her flinching away from the truth before she’d decided to.
She never wanted to let her father down. Not after everything he’d done for her, the concert, the dance, the way he’d trusted her enough to ask instead of accuse.
"Good." Julian nodded, something in his shoulders relaxing slightly. "Then you’ll stay away from him and his friends. Can you do that for me?"
"Yes, Daddy." And she meant it, or at least she was ready to mean it, at least for him.
Forget Nolan, she told herself, walking back up to her room afterward. Besides, he probably hates you now anyway.
It felt almost natural, giving up on him easier, in a strange way, than admitting how much the giving up actually cost her.