Chapter 368: Ninety days after
"When I met your mother again, she’d already been through something very difficult. I thought, at the time, that she was happy, and I should have pursued her the moment I met her instead of waiting. Sebastian married her, but the marriage was never real, the registration was fake, and your mother didn’t know it. He then married someone else in secret, and he kept that hidden from your mother the entire time they were together. When she finally found out, she left."
He paused, glancing at each of their faces in turn, gauging how much further to go.
"That’s not the whole story. It’s more than I can tell you right now, and some of it isn’t even mine to tell. But your mother went through hell getting that man out of our lives afterward. That’s why his name isn’t spoken in this house. Is that okay?" He stood, some finality in the movement, clearly done with the conversation whether they were or not.
"Now hurry up, all of you. You’ll be late for school."
He turned back to the stove, drawing in a long, unsteady breath, and none of them said anything more.
Justina sat frozen at the table, Nolan’s voice from that coffee shop suddenly loud in her ears again, she was my dad’s mistress and beneath it, worse, her own voice, calling her mother a liar to her face in that bedroom, throwing a wound this deep back at her like it was nothing, like it hadn’t cost Amara everything to survive it in the first place.
The tears came before she could stop them, silent at first, then steady, refusing to slow no matter how many times she wiped at her face with the back of her hand.
Nobody at the table said anything to her about it , Josh simply reached over and pushed her untouched plate a little closer, JJ went quiet over her cereal, and Julian kept his back to all of them at the stove, giving her, without a word, the small privacy of pretending not to notice.
The guilt didn’t ease with the crying. If anything, it dug in harder, settling somewhere deep and permanent, a weight Justina understood, with sudden and complete clarity, she was going to be carrying for a very long time.
—
Ninety days passed before Amara opened her eyes.
Julian had not attended a single business meeting in all that time, not one call, not one signature, nothing that pulled him away from the hospital or the house for longer than absolutely necessary.
He’d become, in those three months, the person Amara had always quietly been for their family without either of them ever naming it as a job, the one who checked JJ’s homework at the kitchen table each night, who sat with Josh in comfortable silence when words weren’t the thing his son needed, who knocked gently on Justina’s door every evening just to ask how she was, even on the nights she answered only with a muffled fine through the wood.
He hadn’t wanted Amara to wake up to a version of their family that had come apart in her absence.
He’d wanted her to wake up and find that everything had simply been waiting for her, held together exactly as she’d have held it herself.
He was there, as he was every morning, in the chair beside her bed, quietly telling the empty room about JJ’s science project and Josh’s exam results and Justina’s slow, careful return to something like normal, when Amara’s eyes finally opened.
"Hey, baby." Julian’s voice caught, relief flooding through him so fast he could barely get the words out steady. "How are you feeling?"
"I’m okay, baby." Her voice was hoarse, unused for months, but her eyes found his immediately, clear and present in a way that made something in his chest finally unclench after ninety days of holding it tight.
She tried to sit up, and he was there instantly, an arm behind her shoulders, helping her settle against the raised bed. "How’s Justina?"
"She’s fine," Julian said. "Back at school. She’s healing well."
"And Nolan?"
Julian hesitated. "I had to drop the charges," he started carefully, watching her face.
"How is the boy doing?" Amara asked again, cutting through it, and Julian understood, somewhere underneath the fog of the last three months, that she wasn’t asking about the legal case at all. She’d never much cared about that part. She wanted to know if he was alright.
"No," Julian admitted quietly. "He’s not. I heard he has sickle cell disease, it went untreated too long while he was in custody, and on top of that, he tried to hurt himself while he was in there. He’s still hospitalized." He rubbed a hand over his face.
"I don’t know how it’s going to affect Justina, honestly. She already thinks all of this is her fault." He shook his head, reaching for her hand instead of continuing down that road any further.
"Can we not talk about all of it right now? I’ve missed my wife. You really gave me a scare, Amara."
"Yeah," Amara said simply, and pulled him into a hug as best she could manage from the bed, arms wrapping weakly but surely around him, holding on the way she hadn’t been able to for three long months, letting the rest of it Nolan, Justina, Sebastian, all of it wait just a little while longer.
Amara insisted on going home the moment she was strong enough to argue about it, and she argued about it a great deal.
She hadn’t spent ninety days lying in a hospital bed just to spend the rest of her recovery in another one, she told Julian, and after hours of gentle, persistent refusal on her part, he finally gave in and had her discharged, settling her into their own bedroom instead, with a private nurse arranged to check on her twice a day.
Amara complained about the nurse almost immediately. "I don’t need a babysitter, Julian," she said, more than once, tears of frustration threatening every time the poor woman came in to take her vitals or remind her not to stand too quickly.
But she let it happen anyway, mostly because she could see how much it settled Julian to know someone trained was watching over her when he couldn’t be in the room himself.