Chapter 370: Make room
Justina’s heart stopped the moment the maid told her Amara was home, resting upstairs, waiting the way she always used to wait for her children at the end of a school day.
Justina stood frozen in the front hallway for a long moment, unable to feel her own legs, caught between two versions of the same terror, one where her mother had woken up, and everything might, somehow, still be salvageable.
And another where her mother had woken up and would never look at her the same way again, where the truth would finally have to come out in full, and everyone in her life would learn exactly what she’d done and hate her for it.
She walked up the stairs slowly, Sebastian’s words looping through her mind the whole way your mother is a good woman, set against her own, the ones she’d thrown at Amara in that bedroom before everything fell apart.
Liar. Mistress. The tears started before she’d even reached the top of the staircase, tracking silently down her face, and she barely registered walking the rest of the way to her parents’ door.
She stopped in the doorway.
Josh and JJ were curled against their mother on the bed, their father standing close by watching them with an expression of quiet, unguarded pride, and Justina felt, all at once, entirely out of place in a room that had been hers to walk into freely her whole life.
A few months ago she would have marched straight in and shoved JJ over to claim her own spot beside their mother without a second thought.
Now she felt like she’d forfeited the right to any of it, and she simply stood there in the doorway instead, crying quietly, unable to make her feet carry her any further.
"Justina, baby, why are you standing there crying? Come in," Julian said, noticing her first, and everyone’s heads turned toward the door at once.
Justina couldn’t make herself meet her mother’s eyes. She kept hers fixed somewhere near the floor, bracing for whatever she might find if she looked up anger, disappointment, the horror she’d seen on Amara’s face that last night before the crash.
There was none of that. When she finally forced herself to look, all she found in her mother’s expression was love, plain and complete, without a trace of the fury Justina had spent months certain she deserved.
Amara tilted her head slightly. "Why don’t you two go get changed? I want to speak with your sister."
"No, Mummy, I don’t want to leave," JJ protested immediately, tightening her grip.
But Josh understood at once. He sat up, gently prying JJ loose despite her protest, and half-carried, half-dragged her off the bed and out of the room, murmuring something about giving their mother a minute that JJ clearly didn’t want to hear.
Julian lingered by the door, and his staying only made Justina’s nerves worse. Some part of her had hoped, foolishly, that this conversation might somehow happen without him ever having to be in the room for it.
"Honey, could you give us a moment, please?" Amara asked, turning to him.
"Okay, baby." Julian crossed to Justina first, pressing a kiss to her forehead on his way out, entirely unaware of the storm he was leaving his daughter alone to face, and then the door clicked shut behind him, and it was just the two of them.
Justina stayed rooted where she stood, still too far from the bed to close the distance on her own.
"Come here, baby," Amara said softly, arms already open.
Justina lifted her head at last, meeting her mother’s eyes properly for the first time since the accident, and found nothing there but the same open, unguarded love that had greeted her every single day of her life, despite everything.
The sob that had been building in her chest broke loose all at once, and she crossed the room and climbed onto the bed into her mother’s arms, crying hard enough that the words barely came out whole.
"I’m sorry... I’m sorry, Mum, I’m so sorry..."
Amara said nothing at first, just held her, one hand smoothing slowly over her daughter’s back the way she had when Justina was small enough to be soothed by nothing more than the shape of her mother’s arms.
She was hurt, deeply, genuinely hurt, in a place that would likely take a long time to fully heal, but she’d already decided, somewhere in the quiet of the last three months, that she wasn’t going to let this moment define the rest of their relationship.
Children made mistakes. Even devastating ones. What mattered now was whether Justina understood the weight of what she’d done, and whether she was willing to actually grow from it, because that, Amara believed, was the only real measure of anyone not the mistake itself, but what came after it.
"It’s okay, baby," Amara whispered, when the worst of the crying had eased enough for words to come through.
"I was wrong," Justina said, voice trembling. "I never should have lied about Nolan. I never should have gone along with what he was telling me, and I should never have said he tried to touch me." She took a shaky breath, forcing the rest of it out before she lost her nerve.
"That night Nolan had asked me to go change my dress into something that would make me look sexy, he asked if he could help me with my zip, and I went along with something I shouldn’t have, because I liked him, and I wanted him to like me back. And then you walked in, and I realized all at once how far I’d let things go, and I panicked, and I tried to fix it with a lie instead of just telling you the truth."
Amara let the confession sit in the space between them without interrupting it, without softening it or rushing past it, because she wanted her daughter to hear her own words land, wanted the shape of what she’d done to come from Justina herself rather than being handed to her secondhand.
"I’m so sorry, Mummy," Justina said again, smaller now. "I know you hate me."
"No." Amara pulled back just enough to look at her properly, cupping her daughter’s face in both hands.
"No, baby, I could never hate you. The most important thing is that you understand what you did wrong, not that someone else has to tell you, but that you actually know it yourself. It’s okay to like a boy at your age, Justina. That’s not the mistake. But every choice has a consequence, and if you’re going to make choices like that, you have to be ready to live with whatever comes after them. That’s simply how life works."
She wiped a tear from Justina’s cheek with her thumb.
"So here’s what we’re going to do, you and I. We’re going to put this behind us, together. And from now on, we tell each other the truth always, no matter how much it might hurt in the moment because a hard truth will never cost us as much as a lie meant to protect us from it."
Her voice caught, thick with everything the last three months had carried.
"I love you so much, Justina. You have no idea, half of it, what your father and I went through just to have you. You mean the world to both of us. But I would rather you shatter my whole world with the truth than protect it with a lie. Do you understand what I’m telling you, baby?"
She lifted her daughter’s chin gently, holding her gaze, both of them crying freely now.
Justina nodded. "Yes, Mum. I know. I understand."
"Good." Amara pressed a kiss to her forehead and pulled her back into a tight, steady hug, holding on the way she’d been unable to for ninety long days, and for the first time since the crash, Justina let herself believe that maybe, somehow, this really could be put behind them.
A few moments later, the bedroom door opened again.
JJ came in first, carrying a tray far too carefully for someone her age, Josh close behind her, and Julian bringing up the rear.
"Why does Justina get all of Mum?" JJ complained, handing the tray off to Josh so she could climb straight onto the bed and wedge herself into the hug, already changed out of her school uniform, entirely unwilling to wait her turn.
"I want a group hug too," Josh said, passing the tray back to his father and launching himself onto the mattress without so much as a warning, an unusual amount of enthusiasm for a boy who normally treated physical affection like a currency he refused to spend loosely on anyone but his mother.
"Make room."
"I want to hug my wife too, you know," Julian said, setting the tray down on the nightstand and squeezing in beside the pile of children already gathered around Amara.