Chapter 367: It’s my fault
Julian was still sitting outside Amara’s room, JJ asleep against his shoulder, when a nurse came to tell him Justina was waking up.
Julian, Josh, and JJ went in together the moment the nurse said Justina was awake, and the first thing out of her mouth wasn’t an apology, wasn’t even a question about herself.
"Dad, where’s Mum? I want to see her."
"You’ll see her later," Julian said gently, settling into the chair beside her bed and taking her hand. "Tell me how you’re feeling first, princess."
"I’m sorry, Daddy." The tears came instantly, as though they’d simply been waiting behind her eyes for the first opening. "It’s all my fault. Everything is all my fault."
Josh stood quietly near the foot of the bed and said nothing at all not because he had nothing to say, but because for the first time since he’d found that clean, unstained dress on the floor of her room, some small, tired part of him was simply grateful she was alive to cry about any of it.
Whatever came next, whatever their father would do when the whole truth finally reached him, could wait.
It had to. He watched his sister’s face, hollow and wrecked with guilt, and felt something in him that was almost pity, tangled up hopelessly with everything else he already knew and hadn’t said.
Julian gathered her carefully into his arms, mindful of the sling on her shoulder, and held her while she cried.
"Please," Justina said, when the worst of it had passed enough for her to speak clearly. "Take me to see Mum."
Julian hesitated only a moment before nodding, and had the nurses arrange a wheelchair so she could be taken down the hall properly, careful of the injury, careful of everything.
They found Amara exactly as Julian had left her, pale against the white sheets, a tube taped beneath her nose, a monitor tracking the slow, steady rhythm of her heart in quiet, patient beeps.
Justina made a small, broken sound the moment she saw her, hands pressed to her mouth.
"It’s my fault." Her voice came out barely above a whisper, wheelchair rolled as close to the bed as the nurse would allow. "She’s never going to forgive me. I wish it was me lying there instead of her."
JJ, standing pressed against her father’s side, began to cry too, quiet, frightened tears at the sight of her mother so still and so wired with machines, too young to fully separate the fear of the moment from the guilt hanging in the air around her older sister.
Josh crossed to JJ and wrapped an arm around her, pulling her against him, trying the way he always tried to be the steady one, the one who didn’t fall apart even when everything in him wanted to.
"Never say that," Julian said firmly, turning to Justina, his voice thick despite the effort he was clearly putting into keeping it level.
"No matter what happened, your mother loves you. She loves you so much, Justina. Do you hear me?" He reached out and took her free hand, holding it alongside JJ’s small one, trying to anchor all three of his children at once.
"Listen to me, baby. Your mummy is going to be fine. She’s going to come back to us."
He said it with as much certainty as he could manage, though his own eyes were bright with tears he refused to let fall in front of them, and for a long moment the four of them simply stood there together around Amara’s bed, listening to the steady, mechanical rhythm that was, for now, the only proof any of them had that she was still with them at all.
Days passed without Amara waking, the coma stretching from one uncertain morning into the next, and Julian had quietly set down everything else in his life to hold what remained of it together.
Deals he’d once treated as urgent went untouched. Calls went unanswered for hours at a time. His whole world, without him fully announcing it to anyone, had narrowed down to a single hospital room and the three children he was trying, not always successfully, to keep steady in his wife’s absence.
The kids went back to school eventually, because Amara would have insisted on it, because routine was the only thing any of them had left to hold onto, and because Julian couldn’t bear the thought of all three of them sitting at home each day, staring at a phone that might ring with news he wasn’t ready for.
One morning, while he stood at the stove making eggs he barely had the appetite to eat himself, Justina worked up the nerve she’d been circling for days.
"Dad," she started, voice small. "About Nolan,"
"Justina." Julian didn’t turn around from the stove, and his voice, when it came, was steady in the deliberate way of a man holding himself together by force of will alone.
"Listen to me. I want us to put all of that behind us, okay? You don’t need to worry about any of it anymore. And I never want to hear that boy’s name spoken in this house again."
Justina’s mouth closed around whatever she’d been about to say next, the confession dying unspoken in her throat.
"Daddy," JJ said instead, quietly, looking up from her cereal with the particular fearlessness only a twelve-year-old could manage in a room this tense, "is it because Mummy knew Nolan’s dad in the past?"
"Jolene Jade," Julian said her full name the way he rarely did, more warning than reprimand, and had to stop himself for a moment, gripping the edge of the counter, visibly working to hold everything together before he spoke again.
When he finally turned around, some of the fight had gone out of his face, replaced by something older and more tired. "Okay. Fine."
He pulled out a chair and sat down across from all three of them, taking a slow breath before he started.
"I wanted your mother to be the one to tell you this, when she thought you were ready. I still think you’re too young to understand all of it, but..." He shook his head slightly.