Chapter 366: Dropping the case
The car met the guardrail with a sound that seemed to swallow the whole street.
For a moment afterward, everything went strangely quiet the way it always does, in the half-second after something irreversible has already happened and the world hasn’t caught up yet to how bad it is.
Then the cyclists were shouting, and people were running from the sidewalk, from nearby doorways, phones already lifted to call for help.
Amara was slumped against the wheel, a thin line of blood tracking down from somewhere near her hairline, unconscious.
A few feet away, on the rough shoulder of the road where she’d been thrown clear, Justina lay equally still, one arm bent beneath her at an angle that made more than one bystander look away.
"Someone call an ambulance!" a woman shouted, already kneeling beside Justina, two fingers pressed clumsily to her throat, searching for a pulse and trying, with shaking hands, not to move her at all.
Sirens were already rising somewhere in the distance, cutting through the noise of the gathering crowd, but it would be minutes yet before either of them reached help minutes that stretched out long and unbearable over the quiet street, over the crumpled car, over two bodies.
Julian got the call while he was still in a meeting with his lawyers, going over the last details of the case he’d sworn, only hours earlier, to make sure Nolan never recovered from.
He didn’t remember the drive to the hospital afterward, not really just fragments of it, red lights blurring past, his own hands shaking on the wheel in a way they never did, not even in board meetings, not even in the worst of his business dealings.
He found them both in the same wing, and a nurse’s station, and for a long moment he simply stood in the hallway between the two rooms, unable to make himself walk into either one first.
Amara lay pale and still, tubes and monitors surrounding her in a way that made his chest cave in on itself just looking at her.
Justina, a few doors down, was bruised and scraped but breathing steadily, unconscious rather than in any immediate danger, though nobody had told him that yet, and in that first unbearable minute he didn’t know which of them he was more afraid for.
Josh arrived not long after, and the moment he saw his mother through the doorway, monitors beeping steadily beside her, he swayed on his feet hard enough that a nurse reached out to steady him before he went down entirely.
They waited together after that Julian, Josh, and eventually JJ, brought in by one of the household staff, too young to fully understand what she was looking at but old enough to know it was bad, curling silently into her father’s side in the waiting room chair.
It was nearly two hours before a doctor finally came to update them. Amara, they explained carefully, had sustained a serious head injury and significant internal bruising she would need to remain under close observation, and the coming days would tell them more, but for now, she was stable.
Justina’s injuries, by contrast, were comparatively minor a dislocated shoulder, cuts and bruising from the road, nothing that wouldn’t heal in a matter of weeks. She would be fine.
Julian exhaled for what felt like the first time since the phone call, one hand pressed briefly over his eyes.
It was in the quiet after that news settled that Josh spoke.
"Dad." His voice came out slow, careful, nothing like his usual clipped economy of words. "Can you let that boy go? Nolan. He has sickle cell. If he stays in there any longer, it could kill him."
Julian turned to look at his son properly for the first time since arriving. "That boy tried to hurt your sister, Josh."
"Dad, please." Josh’s hand found his father’s arm, gripping it the way he almost never let himself touch anyone outside of their mother.
"Mum and Justina are already like this. I’m begging you, do this. So that whatever’s watching over us brings some goodwill back our way. So it brings Mum back to us."
He couldn’t say the rest of it, couldn’t say what he actually knew, what Lucy had told him, what the clean, unstained dress had already told him hours before any of this happened.
Not here, not now, not with his mother lying unconscious two rooms away and his father barely holding himself together as it was.
But he also couldn’t sit there and let an innocent boy die in a cell over a lie his sister had told out of panic, not when there was something, anything, he could do about at least that much of it.
Julian studied his son for a long moment, clearly turning something over Josh had never once, in sixteen years, asked his father for anything this pointed, this urgent, and that alone carried a weight Julian couldn’t entirely explain even to himself.
But his mind was too full of Amara, too full of the machines keeping careful watch over her, to hold onto his anger with the same certainty he’d felt standing in that bedroom doorway the night before.
"Fine," he said finally, already reaching for his phone. He stepped a few feet away and made the call quietly, instructing his lawyers to drop the charges immediately, effective that hour, no explanation given beyond a change of heart he didn’t feel like justifying to anyone.
It didn’t undo what had already happened, though. By the time the order went through, Nolan had already been rushed to a hospital of his own, his condition serious enough that the officers monitoring him had stopped waiting for legal permission and called an ambulance on instinct alone.
Julian sat with that news for a moment, something uneasy settling in his chest that he didn’t examine too closely, and then turned his attention back to the only two people in the building who mattered to him right now.