Chapter 360: His Game
"That’s not true." Justina’s voice shook, tears already spilling before she could stop them, and she was on her feet before she’d fully decided to stand. "This is a lie. Stay away from me."
"Alright," Nolan said, not moving to follow her, watching her walk toward the door with something unreadable in his expression. "Ask your mum, then."
Justina didn’t turn around. She walked straight out of the coffee shop, the bell over the door jangling behind her, the folded newspaper page still sitting on the table where he’d left it, and didn’t stop walking until she was three blocks away and finally let herself cry.
Justina got home and found her mother in the kitchen, and the question was out of her mouth before she’d fully decided to ask it.
"Mum, was Dad the first man you ever dated?"
Amara went still, dish towel halfway folded in her hands. She’d known, somewhere in the back of her mind, that this conversation was coming eventually had known it the moment she saw Sebastian’s face in that police station lobby but eventually had always felt comfortably far away, and now it was standing in her kitchen looking at her with red-rimmed eyes.
"Justina," she started, searching for some way into it that wouldn’t break something she couldn’t put back together, and that was exactly when her phone rang.
She glanced at the screen. A name she couldn’t ignore, a call she genuinely needed to take.
"Baby, I have to take this. We’ll talk about it, I promise later." She kissed the top of her daughter’s head and disappeared into the study, already answering.
Justina stood alone in the kitchen, and something about the timing the perfect, convenient timing of it settled into her chest as confirmation rather than coincidence. She’s lying. Nolan was right.
Her phone buzzed.
Nolan: Did you ask her?
She waited a long moment before she typed back. She lied about it.
Nolan: See. i told you. Just tell me you don’t like me, and I’ll leave you alone.
She thought about her father’s question can you stay away from him? And her own answer, given so easily, meant so completely at the time.
But if her mother could lie to her, straight to her face, in her own kitchen, then surely one small lie of her own didn’t cost as much as she’d been taught it did.
She wasn’t doing anything wrong. She told herself that clearly, deliberately, the way you tell yourself something you’re not sure you believe.
Justina: i like you too, Nolan.
She was smiling by the time she hit send.
What followed was weeks of careful architecture, a whole second life built quietly underneath the one her parents could see.
Study sessions that weren’t. Movie nights at Lucy’s that were actually movie nights with Nolan, Lucy covering without complaint because that was simply what Lucy did.
His name changed in her phone to Lucy so that when Amara glanced at a lit-up screen across the kitchen island, nothing there looked out of place.
Amara noticed anyway some instinct, some low hum of unease she couldn’t name, kept her sniffing around the edges of her daughter’s days, asking one too many questions at dinner, watching Justina’s face a beat longer than she used to but Justina had gotten good, frighteningly good, at erasing anything that might give her away before her mother ever got close enough to see it clearly.
It was nearly a month in when Justina asked Amara to drop her off at a party on campus, and Amara, worn down by weeks of finding nothing suspicious no matter how hard she looked, agreed.
Nolan was waiting when she arrived.
They’d barely said hello before Amara’s car had pulled away from the curb, and Justina didn’t think anything of it when he mentioned, in the middle of the noise and the music, that Amara had already gone.
It was only afterward, five minutes later, ten minutes later, that Amara realized, halfway back down the road, that Justina’s phone was still sitting in the passenger seat where she’d set it down to fix her shoe before getting out.
Amara turned the car around without a second thought. It wasn’t a big decision. It was the kind of small, automatic thing mothers do a hundred times over the years, hardly worth mentioning except that this particular U-turn put her back outside that house only a few minutes after she’d left it, phone in hand, walking up the same path she’d just watched her daughter disappear down.
She was still in the front hallway, scanning the crowd for a familiar white sweater, when something instinct, or twelve years of motherhood, or the same restless unease that had been humming under her skin for weeks pulled her attention toward the crowd.
Amara stopped a girl near the base of the stairs, half-shouting over the music. "Have you seen Justina? white sweater, tall."
"Upstairs, I think," the girl called back, pointing.
Amara took the stairs two at a time.
Upstairs, in a bedroom someone had clearly cleared out for exactly this purpose, a dress lay out on the bed, the zipper half-down, Justina’s back. Nolan had stepped in close behind her.
"Want me to help you with that?" he asked, reaching for the zip.
"Sure," Justina said, and it was right as his fingers brushed the fabric that she heard footsteps in the hall, fast and familiar, and something in her chest seized without her fully understanding why. She stepped back from him hard, putting distance between them just as the door swung open.
Her mother stood in the doorway.
Justina didn’t decide to cry. It simply happened, all at once, the tears arriving faster than any explanation could have, and even Nolan looked genuinely confused for a second, glancing between the two of them like he was trying to work out what he’d walked into.
"What is going on here?" Amara’s voice was low, controlled, the particular calm of a mother forcing herself to stay steady before she had all the facts.
Justina crossed the room and threw herself into her mother’s arms. "He tried to touch me."
Amara’s whole body went rigid.