Forbidden Echoes

Chapter Ten: A Temporary Truce

The folder, in the end, told them less than either of them wanted and more than either of them could fully sit with.

Fragments, mostly — dated entries in his mother's handwriting that read more like a woman working something out in private than a confession meant for anyone else's eyes. A meeting noted, no explanation given. A line about the lake house, that August, that meant nothing to either of them out of context.

And under it all, the same six words from the back of the photograph, copied out again in different ink, as though she'd needed to write them more than once before she believed them herself:

I should have asked sooner.

No names beyond Elena's. No confirmation of what, exactly, his mother had seen or suspected or feared. Just enough to make the question impossible to put down, and not nearly enough to answer it.

"This is somehow worse than nothing," Jessica said, setting the last page down with the particular frustration of someone who'd braced for a blow and gotten a paper cut instead. "I expected a smoking gun. Instead I got a woman who clearly knew something and never wrote down what."

"Welcome to my family."

Justin closed the folder, the weight of the afternoon — the panic attack, the held hand, the careful distance they'd both put back between themselves afterward — sitting heavily enough in him that he didn't trust himself to look directly at anything for too long.

"We specialize in almost-answers."

She studied him for a moment, something assessing in her expression that had nothing to do with the mystery this time.

"You look wrecked."

"I feel wrecked."

"Then we're done for today."

She said it with a finality that brooked no argument, already standing, already filing the folder back into the drawer they'd taken it from, as if putting the physical object away might somehow quiet the questions it had raised.

"Truce. For tonight. No mystery, no dead mothers, no hidden folders. Just—whatever normal people who aren't investigating their parents' secret past do on a Tuesday."

"That's a big ask. I don't actually remember what normal feels like."

"Then we'll improvise."

She looked around the study as if the answer might be hiding in the bookshelves, then brightened with the specific, slightly dangerous energy of someone who'd just had an idea she found very funny.

"Do you have a game console in this house? Please tell me you have a game console."

It took him a second to place the shift in her — out of investigator, briefly, into someone closer to nineteen than the careful, watchful person she usually let him see.

"I have an embarrassing number of game consoles. Most of them from, like, 2014."

"Even better. Show me."

They ended up on the floor of the living room an hour later, backs against the couch, an ancient console wired up to a television that hadn't been turned on in months, controllers in hand, the house finally quiet around them in a way that felt restful instead of haunted for the first time all day.

Justin had picked a racing game on the grounds that it required no real skill investment and therefore no real risk to his pride, a calculation that turned out to be badly flawed within the first lap.

"You're cheating," he said as her kart sailed past his for the third time.

"I'm not cheating. I'm just better than you. There's a difference."

"There is not a meaningful difference."

"There absolutely is. One's illegal."

She didn't even look over, fully absorbed in the screen, tongue caught between her teeth in a concentration he found, against his will, completely endearing.

"My mom and I used to do this. Different game, motel rooms mostly, whenever we were between places. It was sort of our thing."

"Sorry," he said, easing off the gas without meaning to, the apology automatic.

"Don't be. It's a good memory. I like having one of those that doesn't come with an asterisk."

She glanced at him sideways, something gentler in it than the competitive needling from a second ago.

"Keep racing. I'm not bringing her up to make it sad. I'm bringing her up because this is nice. I haven't done something just because it's nice in a really long time."

He took that in, let it settle, and put his foot back down on the gas, his kart sliding wide on the next turn and crashing spectacularly into a wall while she burst into laughter loud enough to startle even herself.

"That wasn't even a hard turn!"

"I got distracted."

"By what?"

By you, he didn't say, because some sentences were better left exactly where they were — harmless and unspoken, sitting in the back of his throat where they couldn't do any damage.

"By losing gracefully. It's a process."

His phone buzzed against the carpet between them, the screen lighting up with Alex's contact photo — a picture from two summers ago, both of them mid-laugh, neither having any idea yet how much would change.

Alex: still alive? haven't heard from you in days. did the mystery girl murder you

Jessica glanced over, reading upside down with the unselfconscious ease of someone who'd already decided privacy wasn't really a concept that survived close quarters.

"Mystery girl?"

"Alex's words, not mine."

Justin typed back a quick not dead, just busy and set the phone aside, only for it to buzz again almost immediately.

Alex: busy doing WHAT exactly

Alex: also still want details on the stepsister situation. you've given me nothing

"He wants details," Justin admitted, mildly mortified. "About you. About—this. Whatever this is."

"What have you told him?"

"That you exist. That's roughly the extent of my reporting."

He hesitated, then continued because the truce seemed to be extending a kind of permission for honesty he didn't usually grant himself.

"Alex is—he's been my best friend since middle school. His older brother died in a car accident when we were fifteen. He's the only person I know who's actually been through something like this and come out the other side functional."

He looked down at the controller in his hands.

"Doesn't drown himself in routine. Doesn't disappear into himself the way I do. He just found a way to carry it without letting it crush him."

Justin shrugged, uncomfortable with how much he'd just said.

"I don't know how he does it. I've been trying to copy his homework for three years and still failing the test."

Jessica had gone quiet, watching him with an attention that felt different from her usual careful assessment — warmer, less guarded.

"That's not nothing, though. Having someone who's already walked the road you're on. Even if you can't copy the exact steps."

"Maybe."

He picked the phone back up, typed tell you everything later, promise, and set it face-down this time, a small, deliberate boundary between the world outside the room and whatever was happening inside it.

"He's been asking me to come out for weeks. I keep saying no."

"Why?"

"Because leaving the house feels like admitting I'm supposed to be functioning normally again, and I'm not sure I am yet."

He hadn't meant to say that either.

The truce, apparently, came with its own dangerous undertow.

"Pathetic, probably."

"It's not pathetic."

Jessica set her controller down, turning fully toward him now, the racing game forgotten on the screen behind her.

"You're allowed to not be ready. I spent four months running from one room to the next instead of unpacking a single box because unpacking felt like admitting I was staying somewhere instead of just passing through."

She gave a small shrug.

"Everyone's got their own version of the same thing."

"Yours is geography. Mine's apparently video games and avoiding my best friend."

"Same dysfunction, different costume."

The corner of her mouth lifted, and for a moment the heavy weight of the day — the folder, the panic attack, the questions neither of them could answer yet — seemed to recede slightly, replaced by something quieter and more bearable.

Two people sitting on a living-room floor, discovering they were more alike than either had expected.

"You should go," she said after a moment. "Hang out with Alex. Properly, I mean. Not just texting him from the floor of your house at ten p.m."

"You're encouraging me to leave you alone in a house with my evasive father and an unsolved family mystery?"

"I'm encouraging you to have one normal night before we go back to digging through locked drawers."

She picked her controller back up.

"The mystery isn't going anywhere. It's waited twenty years. It can wait one more evening while you go be a teenager for a few hours."

"Besides," she added, restarting the race with a decisiveness that suggested the conversation, for now, was over, "I could use a few hours where I'm not being watched for a reaction. Go see your friend, Justin."

He looked at her — at the easy challenge already settling back into her posture, controller raised, the small, quiet permission she'd just handed him wrapped inside what sounded like a dismissal but wasn't, not really — and felt something shift inside him in a direction he didn't have a name for yet.

"Truce holds till I get back," he said, picking up his controller.

"Truce holds," she agreed.

And sent her kart flying past his for the fourth time that night.