Forbidden Echoes

Chapter Twenty: Cracks in the Mask

Jessica didn't come down for breakfast.

It wasn't unusual, exactly—she'd been keeping later hours since the porch conversation, the kind of late that came from a mind too busy turning things over to let sleep arrive on schedule—but Justin found himself standing at the bottom of the stairs at eight-thirty with two plates instead of one, uncertain when exactly he'd decided that making her breakfast was something he was now simply going to do.

He climbed the stairs and knocked softly on her door.

"You alive in there?"

"Define alive."

Her voice came muffled through the wood, thick with the particular exhaustion of someone who'd slept poorly and knew it.

"I made eggs. Mediocre ones, but edible." He hesitated, his hand still resting against the doorframe. "Can I come in?"

There was a pause, then the sound of her crossing the room. The door opened to reveal her in yesterday's clothes, hair a mess, eyes shadowed in a way that confirmed everything he'd suspected about her night.

"You made me eggs."

"And toast. The toast's actually good. I have one skill in this kitchen, and it's toast."

She managed a tired, almost-smile and let him in. They ended up eating on the floor of her room, plates balanced on their knees, the morning light pale and gray through the window. Justin watched her eat—actually eat, not just rearrange food the way she'd been doing at dinner for the better part of a week—and felt something settle quietly in his chest that had nothing to do with the satisfaction of a job well done and everything to do with a tenderness he hadn't fully let himself name yet.

"You didn't have to do this," she said between bites.

"I know. I wanted to."

The words came out simpler than he'd expected, simpler than he usually allowed himself to be.

"You said something last night about not eating right. I figured the least I could do was put a fork in front of you and make it harder to ignore."

"That's annoyingly thoughtful of you."

"I contain multitudes."

"We've established this."

She set her plate aside, half-finished but more than she'd managed in days, and looked at him with an expression he was starting to recognize—the soft, unguarded one she let surface less often than her dry humor, the one that always made something in his chest tighten in a way he hadn't yet decided whether to be afraid of.

He left her to get dressed not long afterward, and it was in the quiet of his own room, sitting on the edge of his bed with the abandoned breakfast plate still in his hands, that the full weight of what he'd just done caught up with him.

He hadn't thought about it.

That was the part that unsettled him most.

He hadn't deliberated, hadn't calculated, hadn't done the thing he usually did, where every act of caring got filtered through some internal cost-benefit analysis about how much of himself he was willing to risk.

He'd just woken up, thought of her, and acted.

It scared him more than it should have.

He thought of his father—of the easy, practiced warmth Kennedy wore like a second skin, the version of care that now seemed impossible to separate from the hidden trunk, the brand-new deadbolt, and twenty years of unanswered questions. He thought about how easy it would be to convince himself this was the same thing dressed up in gentler language—that the eggs, the soft knock on her door, the careful attention to whether she was eating were simply the early architecture of wanting something from her, the way he feared his father must once have wanted something from Elena.

Is this care, he asked himself, sitting alone with a cold breakfast plate, or is this just a more patient version of wanting?

He didn't have an answer that satisfied him.

It had been easier, in some ways, when the feeling stayed in the realm of desire—uncomfortable, certainly, complicated by the word stepsister, by eight months of grief, by the tangled mess of everything happening inside this house—but at least desire was a feeling he understood the shape of, something he could name, manage, and feel appropriately guilty about in private.

This was different.

This made him want to fix her sleep schedule, remember how she took her coffee, notice immediately the precise quality of exhaustion in her voice through a closed door.

This felt less like wanting and more like needing her to be okay, a feeling so much larger and more dangerous than simple attraction that he didn't fully know what to do with it.

He found her later that afternoon in the garden, finishing the last of the post-rain replanting, and something about the easy, ordinary sight of her—dirt on her knees, hair pulled back, completely unaware she was being watched—undid the last of whatever careful composure he'd been holding onto all morning.

"You're staring again," she said without looking up. "Folding face?"

"Something like that."

He crouched beside her, picking up a trowel without quite deciding to help, simply needing his hands occupied while he worked up to whatever he was about to say.

"Can I tell you something? And you can tell me I'm overthinking it, because I probably am."

"Go ahead."

"I keep doing things for you without thinking about it first. The eggs this morning. The blanket on the porch. Walking you to your door when you're tired even though it's six feet across the hall."

He kept his eyes on the dirt, on his own hands digging a hole for a bulb that didn't really need his help.

"And I keep waiting for it to feel like that's just friendship. Stepsiblings looking out for each other. But it doesn't. It feels like something I'm not supposed to want this badly, and I don't know what to do with the fact that I can't seem to stop wanting it anyway."

Jessica had gone still beside him, her trowel suspended halfway through the motion, the garden settling into that peculiar silence that seemed to arrive just before something important was said.

"I'm scared I'm turning into my dad," Justin continued, quieter now, the words coming more easily once they'd begun. "He's spent twenty years looking like someone who cared while apparently hiding something enormous underneath it. I don't want to be someone who looks like he's taking care of you while actually just steering you toward something I want. I don't know how to be sure which one this is."

"Justin."

Jessica set her own trowel down and turned to face him fully, dirt-streaked hands finding his and gently stilling them.

"You're not your father. The fact that you're scared of becoming him is exactly why you're not."

"That's not actually proof of anything."

"It's the only proof that matters."

Her voice had become steady, certain, the careful precision she usually reserved for photographs and letters now turned toward something far more personal.

"Your dad never once, in everything we've found, showed any sign of questioning his own motives. He just did what he wanted and built a story around it afterward. You're sitting in a garden telling me you're afraid of hurting me before you've even done anything. That's not the same thing.

"That's not even close."

Justin looked at her—at the dirt on her hands, the steadiness in her eyes, the warmth she'd begun allowing him to see more and more often—and felt something inside him crack open the rest of the way.

Not desire exactly, though that was still there, woven through everything.

Something underneath it.

Something larger.

Something more frightening because it asked more of him than wanting ever had.

"I care about you," he said.

Plainly.

Without deflecting humor.

"Not just... not just the other thing, though that's there too, and I'm not going to pretend it isn't. But underneath that.

"I care whether you're sleeping.

"I care whether you're eating.

"I care what happens to you when this is all over, whatever over even looks like for either of us.

"And I don't know what to do with caring this much about someone I've known for five weeks."

Jessica was quiet for a long moment, something working behind her eyes as though she were examining his words with the same patient care she gave every photograph, every letter, every careful piece of a mystery she refused to solve carelessly.

"I don't know what to do with it either," she said at last. "But I don't think not knowing means it's wrong. I think it just means it's new, and big, and we're both too scared of getting it wrong to call it what it actually is."

"What is it actually?"

She held his gaze.

The garden remained quiet around them, the earth still damp from the rain, drying slowly beneath their knees.

For a long moment neither of them answered aloud.

The word sat between them, unspoken, too large and too dangerous to hand to each other yet, even after everything.

"I don't know yet," she said finally. "But I know I'm glad it's you. Whatever it turns out to be."

Justin looked at her, at the careful, deliberate honesty she'd just placed in his hands, and felt the last of his mask give way—not into anything resolved, not into a kiss or a confession with a clean name attached, but into something rawer, quieter, and more honest than either of them had allowed the other to see before.

"Me too," he said.

And he meant it more than he'd meant almost anything in the past eight months.