Chapter 359: Girl Trouble
Across town, Nolan was not having nearly as easy a time of it.
His sister Seren had married and moved out of the country two years earlier, which left exactly one person in the world Nolan could actually talk to when things went sideways King, his late father’s oldest friend, the man Nolan had called uncle for as long as he could remember and, more quietly, something closer to a father figure in all the ways Sebastian rarely managed to be.
"Uncle King." Nolan dropped onto the couch across from him, phone still in his hand, still replaying the police station in his head on some ugly loop.
"Dad Sebastian’s angry at me. Over some stupid rich kid from college."
"Girl trouble?" King raised an eyebrow, not looking up from his glass. King had never gotten along particularly well with Sebastian since the Elara incident years back, a story Nolan had only never heard in half-versions and wasn’t sure he wanted the other half of and he rarely missed a chance to needle him, even secondhand, even through his son.
"Some Vale girl," Nolan admitted. "Apparently Dad knew her mother. Amara."
King went still for exactly a beat too long, and then laughed a short, disbelieving sound, like this was the punchline to a joke only he’d been told the setup for. "Amara. The same Amara."
"You know her?" Nolan asked, sitting up straighter.
"Oh, I knew her very well." King swirled the drink in his hand, watching Nolan over the rim of the glass. "She was your Sebastian’s mistress for seven years."
Nolan blinked. "What do you mean, mistress? Dad was married to Seren’s mother."
"More or less true," King said, in the careful, almost bored tone of a man delivering a fact he’d long since stopped finding shocking.
Something shifted in Nolan’s face surprise first, and then, slower, something colder settling in behind it. The perfect woman, he thought, turning the word over with a bitterness that surprised even him. Turns out she was just a mistress.
That was when the idea found him, fully formed, sitting there in his uncle’s living room with a laugh still hanging in the air.
Amara thought she’d raised a perfect daughter. Nolan smiled, slow and humorless, already picturing exactly how he’d prove her wrong he thought as he goes back home.
—-
It was the weekend, no school to hide behind, and Nolan called Justina first, twice, letting it ring out both times before switching to a text. I have something to tell you. About your family.
Justina stared at the message for a long time before she answered it. She’d promised her father she’d stay away from him. She meant to keep that promise.
But about your family sat there on her screen like a hook she couldn’t quite make herself ignore, and some part of her the part that had spent the last two weeks turning her mother’s strange, distracted mood over and over in her mind without understanding why told herself this might finally be the thing that let her put it all to rest.
One conversation, she told herself. She’d hear him out, tell him whatever this was didn’t matter, and end it permanently. Then she could go back to keeping her word to her father with a clear conscience.
She didn’t know, agreeing to meet him, that Nolan had spent the morning before that text doing considerably more than waiting by his phone.
He’d searched the house first his own house, Sebastian’s house hoping for photographs, proof, something concrete he could hold up in front of Justina’s face.
He found none. What he didn’t know, and what nobody had ever told him, was that when Amara discovered the family she’d spent seven years caring for had been built on a lie, she’d burned every photograph in the Creed mansion before she left it, every image of herself as Sebastian’s devoted wife reduced to ash in a fireplace at two in the morning, taking the evidence of that whole invented life with her.
But photographs weren’t the only record of those years.
Nolan found, tucked in the back of an old drawer Sebastian clearly hadn’t opened in a long time, a handful of magazines and yellowed society newsletters from a decade and a half earlier the kind that had once made a habit of tracking Sebastian Creed’s marriage the way tabloids tracked anyone with enough money to be interesting.
One page, worn soft at the fold, showed a photograph of Sebastian and a much younger Amara at some gala, her hand on his arm, both of them smiling the easy, practiced smile of a couple who believed, at the time, that they had every reason to.
He took the page with him to the coffee shop.
Justina was already seated when he arrived, arms crossed, jaw set, clearly braced for whatever this was going to be.
"It’s okay to be a teenager and make mistakes, you know," Nolan started, sliding into the seat across from her, more gently than she’d expected.
"Even your mother made mistakes when she was young."
"My mother." Justina’s voice went flat and cold. "You’ll keep her name out of your mouth."
"You know your mother and my dad were actually a couple once," Nolan said, ignoring the warning entirely.
"That’s not true. My dad is the first man my mother’s ever been with."
"See this." Nolan slid the folded newsprint across the table, smoothing it flat with two fingers so the photograph faced her.
"See for yourself. Your mother was my dad’s mistress. For seven years."
Justina stared down at the picture at a face that was unmistakably her mother’s, younger, softer around the eyes, her hand resting on the arm of a man Justina had only ever known as someone standing in a police station lobby two weeks ago and felt something cold drop straight through the center of her chest.
"What I’m trying to say," Nolan went on, leaning forward, his voice low and almost gentle now, "is that when you love someone, you might still want to be with them, even if you know deep down they’re not a good person. Take your mother, for example. My dad was married. She knew that. And she stayed anyway, because she wanted to." He paused, watching her face carefully.
"I’m not the perfect guy either, Justina. I know that. But it’s okay to be with me anyway, if you feel the same way I do. Because I love you."