Chapter 362: Are you feeling better?
"No wonder you turned out exactly like the man that raised you," Julian said to Nolan before he turned to follow his wife.
Sebastian was still on his knees, and when he finally looked up, it wasn’t at Julian’s retreating back, it was at his son.
"What have you done, Nolan?" His voice had gone hollow, all the composure from the police station lobby weeks earlier stripped completely away.
"Your father was never like this. I tried, I tried so hard to raise you to be a better man like he was. How did you turn out like this?"
He’d told himself, all these years, that raising Nolan well would count for something, would balance some old scale he’d never quite forgiven himself for.
Watching his son sit in a police station chair with his head in his hands, he understood, all at once and far too late, exactly how wrong he’d been to believe that.
—-
The police kept Nolan in custody overnight while the report was processed. Julian was already on the phone with his lawyers before they’d even reached the car, voice flat and businesslike now, all the fury from the doorway folded away into something colder and far more efficient, the particular calm of a man who intended to make good on every word he’d said.
At home, Justina could not stop crying. Amara sat with her for over an hour, murmuring the same soft reassurances mothers have always used to talk children down from the edge of something too big to hold, while Julian hovered nearby and Josh and JJ sat quietly at the foot of the bed, none of them quite willing to leave until she finally, finally slept.
"Is Justina going to be okay?" JJ asked, small and serious, watching her sister’s chest rise and fall.
"Yes, baby. Your sister’s going to be okay." Amara pressed a kiss to the top of her head. "Why don’t you come with me, and we’ll let her rest?"
JJ went without argument, following Amara and Julian out into the hall, leaving Josh alone in the doorway of his sister’s room.
He lingered there a moment, then stepped inside not to wake her, just to straighten things, the way he straightened everything, an old habit that had never quite left him even in someone else’s mess.
He picked up the white dress from where it had been dropped on the floor, meaning to hang it properly, and it was only as he smoothed the fabric out in his hands that he noticed something wrong.
There was nothing on it. No stain. No spilled drink, no mark of any kind the fabric was perfectly clean.
Josh stood there a long moment, turning that fact over. Justina had said she went upstairs to change because she’d spilled something on her dress. If the dress was clean, there was no reason for her to have gone up there at all.
"Justina." He said her name quietly, not accusing, not yet, just testing the air.
She opened her eyes, swollen and red-rimmed, and looked at him.
"Can you tell me what really happened?" Josh asked.
He didn’t get an answer. Amara appeared in the doorway before Justina could say anything, drawn back by the sound of voices.
"Josh, your sister’s already traumatized. She doesn’t need you asking her to relive it right now."
"Mum, I’m just trying to,"
"Your sister can’t talk right now. You should go to your room." Amara moved past him to sit at Justina’s side, and Justina turned into her immediately, arms wrapping tight around her mother’s waist, burying her face against her.
Josh looked at the two of them for a long moment, said nothing, and walked out.
He didn’t go to his room. He went down the hall, pulled out his phone, and called Lucy.
She picked up on the second ring, and Josh, who rarely wasted words on anyone outside his own small circle, didn’t waste any now. "I need you to tell me what you know. About Justina and Nolan. All of it."
There was a pause on the other end, long enough that Josh almost thought she’d hang up. Then, quietly: "They’ve been seeing each other for weeks. Since the dance, basically. She had me hide pictures of them together so your mum wouldn’t find them." Another pause. "I’ll send them to you now."
The photos landed in his messages a moment later Justina laughing under the school dance lights, close to a boy Josh had watched his mother call the police on twice, close in a way that had nothing to do with someone she was afraid of.
Josh sat on the edge of his own bed for a long time, staring at the screen, piecing together a version of tonight that looked nothing like the one his sister had given the police.
At the station, in a room several miles away, Nolan sat in a chair that had stopped feeling like a chair hours ago, his wrists aching, his face already swollen along one cheekbone where a hand had connected harder than procedure allowed.
Nobody in that room particularly cared whether he confessed to something true. They only wanted him to confess.
"Say it," one of the officers said, leaning close, patience long since worn through. "Make this easy on yourself."
"I didn’t do anything," Nolan said again, the words coming out thick and slurred now, less conviction in them each time he had to repeat them, not because he believed them any less, but because there was only so much a person could keep insisting in a room that had already decided not to listen.
—
Josh was still holding his phone, Lucy’s photos sitting open in his messages, when he came out from his room and passed his parents’ room, he heard just enough through the door to stop him cold.
Talk of passports. Talk of getting the kids out of the country for a while, somewhere quieter, somewhere Justina could recover away from the whispers that had surely already started circulating through school.
His parents meant well he could hear that even through a closed door, hear the worry underneath every word, but he also knew, standing there, that in this particular moment they would only ever see their daughter’s pain and nothing underneath it.
Not what was actually true. Not what it was costing someone else. He went straight to Justina’s room instead.
"Are you feeling better?" he asked, standing in her doorway. "Better enough to talk about what actually happened last night?"