Chapter 364: Cat out of the bag
"Hey, could you take JJ to the bookstore? She wants some new books," Amara asked, standing in Josh’s doorway.
He looked up at her for a long moment, and whatever he saw in her face the effort behind the smile, the tightness she couldn’t quite smooth all the way out made the refusal die in his throat before it started.
"Alright, Mum," he said simply, no argument at all, closing his laptop and grabbing his jacket.
Amara stood at the top of the stairs and watched the two of them head down together, JJ already chattering about which series she wanted to finish, Josh nodding along with more patience than he usually bothered to show her.
She waited until she heard the front door close, until she heard the car pull out of the driveway and fade down the street, before she finally turned back down the hall toward Justina’s room, ready, at last, to have the conversation she’d been putting off for exactly as long as she safely could.
Justina was curled up on her bed when Amara stepped inside, and for a moment Amara just stood in the doorway looking at her daughter she’d carried, this baby whose small arms had once been enough to hug an entire bad day out of her, the child who’d made her feel, for the first time in her life, like a whole and complete woman rather than someone missing a piece of herself.
It was hard, looking at her now, curled up small against the pillows, to reconcile that memory with whatever had been unfolding in this house for weeks without her knowing.
"Mum? Is everything okay?" Justina asked, sitting up. The crying had stopped. She looked almost entirely normal now, composed in a way that, under any other circumstances, Amara would have taken as a good sign.
"Well, yes." Amara kept her voice soft, deliberately light. "I can’t believe your aunt Amira’s phone is off. Can you call Lucy for me? I want to check whether she’s heard from her mother." She held out Justina’s phone, already open to the contact list, and watched.
Justina saw it and felt something drop straight through her stomach. She took the phone with hands that weren’t quite steady, and instead of pressing the saved contact, she began typing frantically, searching for something, anything that might pass for an explanation.
"That’s Lucy, right? Just call her," Amara said.
"No, this is Lucy’s other number. She’s not using this one anymore. I’ll call her real one now." Justina’s voice came out too fast, too rehearsed.
"Are you sure that’s Lucy’s other number?" Amara asked, calm, so calm, though her heart was already hammering.
"Yes, Mum. It’s Lucy’s other number."
Amara let the silence sit a moment before she answered. "No. It’s not. I already called that number, Justina. It’s not Lucy’s."
Justina said nothing.
"Whose number is that, Justina Amara?" Amara used her daughter’s middle name deliberately now the name her own father had given her with so much pride, a name that had always, in this house, meant I am speaking to the person underneath the excuse, not the excuse itself.
Justina flinched at the sound of it, and the tears came again, fast and unstoppable.
"Tell me the truth." Amara’s eyes were shut now, her own tears sliding free even as her voice held. "Did that boy try to touch you, or you let him willingly?"
Justina cried harder, no words coming, her mouth opening and closing around nothing.
"Speak, Justina." Amara opened her eyes now, looking directly at her daughter. "Did he try to touch you, or did you lie about it?"
The silence that followed lasted only a few seconds, but it told Amara everything her daughter couldn’t bring herself to say out loud.
Amara took a step back, one hand pressed briefly to her own chest, as though she needed to physically hold something in place.
"You were lying. This whole time." Her voice cracked. "What else did you hide from us? Sneaking around with him, for how long? That boy is sitting in a police station right now, for a crime you accused him of, Justina. How terribly did I fail, as a mother, that you thought lying to my face was easier than telling me the truth?"
"Mum, I’m sorry," Justina said, voice shaking, reaching toward her. "But you lied too..."
Amara looked at her then with an expression Justina had never once seen on her mother’s face in sixteen years, not anger exactly, something closer to disbelief, as though she were looking at a stranger wearing her daughter’s features, unable, for just a moment, to find the little girl she’d walked in here remembering.
"What did you say?"
Amara asked quietly, the way people ask questions they’ve already heard the answer to but need repeated anyway, as if the second time might land differently, might somehow come out kinder than the first.
"I lied because you lied too, Mum." Justina’s voice was small now, stripped of all the practiced calm from a moment ago.
"I asked you if Dad was the first man in your life. You said yes. But you lied, Mum. You lied. You were Nolan’s dad’s mistress. For seven years."
The words landed exactly like a blade, and Amara felt them go in exactly that deep, not because she hadn’t known, not because some part of her hadn’t been braced for this exact sentence since the moment she saw Sebastian’s face again in that police lobby, but because hearing it said aloud, in her own daughter’s voice, cracked something in her that all her private grieving over the years had never quite managed to reach.
She pressed a hand flat against her chest, as though she could physically hold the ache in place, and for a moment she couldn’t speak at all.
"What," she finally managed, and it wasn’t really a question. It was closer to disbelief given a single syllable to live in.