Chapter 365: Everyone who believed you
"I didn’t tell you," Amara said slowly, once she found her voice again, "because I wanted to wait until you were old enough to actually understand what happened. I wanted to protect you from something that had nothing to do with you."
She shook her head, some of the shock hardening now into something sharper.
"But you know what, I don’t owe you that explanation. Not right now. Not while we’re standing here talking about what you did." Her voice rose, not loud, but taut, stretched thin over something that had been building in her for hours.
"You think that’s the same thing? A boy is sitting in a jail cell right now, Justina. Because of a lie you told. Do you understand what that means? Real victims, girls who actually go through what you claimed happened to you, they don’t get believed, they don’t get taken seriously, because of things like this. Because of people who lie about it when it’s convenient." Her voice cracked on the last word.
"I cannot believe you, my own daughter could do something like this. And then.... then... try to justify it by throwing a half truth from my past that you do not have even the slightest clue of it back in my face."
"You have killed me," she said next, quieter now, and shook her head slowly, like she was trying to physically dislodge the words she’d just heard. "Do you understand that? You have absolutely killed me."
"See Mum, that’s the thing, even Dad once said..." Justina was on her knees now, hands twisting together in her lap.
"He said if I ever broke his heart, he wouldn’t be able to take it. And when you walked into that room, Mum, I panicked. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t plan it. It just, it came out, and then it was already too big to take back."
"You are our child." Amara’s voice shook, somewhere between fury and grief, the two so tangled together in that moment she couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.
"Of course we would have been hurt if you made a mistake. A real mistake. Sneaking out, lying about a party, even lying about liking a boy we told you to stay away from all of that, we could have survived, Justina. All of that is just being sixteen. But this..." She stopped, pressing her lips together hard, fighting to keep her voice from breaking entirely.
"This, you have killed both of us with. Not just me. Your father too. Everyone who believed you."
She stood there a long moment, hands curling slowly into fists at her sides, because she didn’t know, in that moment, what to do with the sheer volume of what she was feeling, didn’t have anywhere to put it.
She thought, unbidden, of Seren. Of the little girl she’d raised for seven years believing with her whole heart that the child was hers, only to learn otherwise all at once, in the space of a single terrible afternoon, and after was used as a tool to hurt her.
And of the distance she’d built after that, brick by careful brick, not because Seren had done anything wrong she was but a child but because Amara had never quite managed to separate the child from the lie that had wrapped around her.
She’d told herself, for years, that she’d made peace with that decision. Standing here now, she understood she never really had.
But even that grief, old and familiar as it was, had never once cut this deep because Seren had never been hers by blood, and this, this girl on her knees in front of her now, sobbing, was.
This is my own child, Amara thought, the realization landing with its own separate, exhausting weight. How do I survive being lied to by my own child?
She didn’t answer that question, not out loud, not even fully to herself. She reached down instead, took Justina’s hand, not gently, not the way she’d have held it a week ago, but firmly, the grip of someone who had made a decision and did not intend to be argued out of it, and pulled her up off the floor.
"Get up," she said. "We’re going to the police station. Right now. You’re going to tell them exactly what actually happened that night."
Justina didn’t resist. She let herself be pulled down the stairs, out the front door, into the car, the whole house behind them gone completely silent except for the sound of two car doors closing and an engine starting in the driveway, carrying them both toward whatever came next.
In the car, Amara tried Julian first, the phone ringing out twice before going to voicemail both times.
Where are you, she thought, foot pressing a little harder on the accelerator than she meant to, and set the phone down long enough to dial the police station instead.
"This is Mrs. Vale," she said, the moment the call connected, keeping her voice steady through sheer force of will. "Can you get Nolan Holt out of his cell? I’m on my way to the station now, but I might take a little time."
"Alright, ma’am," the officer on the line said, and there was something in the brief pause before he said it that Amara didn’t have time to examine, because that was exactly when she heard it voices rising behind him, sudden and sharp, someone else’s phone or radio catching a burst of panic she wasn’t meant to hear at all. A faint, urgent voice, half-muffled: the prisoner tried to hurt himself...
Amara’s heart seemed to stop entirely for a beat, the phone still pressed to her ear, the words tried to hurt himself looping once, twice, refusing to fully land.
She never got the chance to ask what it meant.
A group of cyclists appeared ahead in the road, spread wider across the lane than they should have been, and Amara’s hands moved before her mind had caught up to the danger, jerking the wheel hard to avoid them, overcorrecting in the half-second of pure instinct that swallows a driver whole in moments like that.
The passenger door swung open on the turn, and Justina, unbuckled, still shaking from everything that had happened inside the house, was thrown against it, tumbling out onto the roadside as the car spun away from her, Amara’s hands white-knuckled on a wheel that no longer seemed to be listening to her at all.