What Nina Already Knows
1092 Words
I didn't sleep. I lay there listening for a car door, for footsteps, for anything that would tell me whether Julian had actually meant what he texted or whether it was one more promise he wouldn't keep.
By seven in the morning Nina found me still on the couch, eyes open, staring at nothing.
"You didn't check the window," she said. It wasn't a question.
"I didn't want to know."
She went to the window herself, moved the curtain an inch, and looked down at the street. Her face didn't change, which told me everything before she said a word.
"He's still there," she said. "Sitting in the car. Hasn't moved."
Something in my chest pulled in two directions at once, and I hated both of them. Part of me wanted to run down and demand my answer right there on the sidewalk. Part of me wanted him gone so badly I could have screamed it through the glass.
"Don't go down there," Nina said, reading my face the way she' read it since we were nineteen. "Whatever you say to him this morning, half-asleep and still in yesterday's clothes, you won't be able to take it back. Let him sit. Let him wonder."
"That feels cruel."
"He watched you find out your marriage was a lie and didn't chase you into the elevator. Cruel left the building a long time before you did." She poured coffee into two mugs and set one in front of me, hard enough that some of it slopped over the rim. "You need to eat something. You need to shower. And then you need to call the lawyer I told you about, because Julian Cole does not sit outside apartment buildings for six hours out of guilt alone. Men like him do it because they're calculating something."
"You think this is a strategy."
"I think everything about the family is a strategy. I've watched you shrink for three years trying to keep up with people who plan every sentence before they say it. I'm not going to sit here and watch you walk back into that without your own plan first."
I wrapped my hands around the coffee mug and let the heat bite into my palms. "I don't know how to have a plan, Nina. I don't even know what happened last night."
"Then we find out. Piece by piece. Starting with a lawyer, not with Julian's version of events." She sat across from me, elbows on her knees, voice dropping into something gentler. "I know you love him. I've never doubted that, even when I couldn't stand watching what loving him did to you. But love isn't a reason to walk in blind. Not this time."
My phone buzzed on the table between us. I flinched like it might bite me.
Julian: I saw Nina at the window. I know you're up to here. Just give me ten minutes.
I stared at the message so long the screen dimmed and went dark on its own.
"Ten minutes," I said out loud, mostly to myself. "He wants ten minutes to explain three years."
"Then he can put it in writing," Nina said, flatly. "Words are cheap in a car outside someone's building. If it's real, it'll survive a lawyer's office too."
I almost smiled at that, despite everything, because it sounded exactly like something Nina would say, blunt enough to leave a mark. But my hands were still shaking around the mug, and I set it down before I dropped it.
"What if it's not what it looked like?" I said quietly. "What if there's an actual reason?"
"Then he'll still be standing there tomorrow and the day after, and he can tell it to a lawyer with both of us in the room, and it can hold up to somebody besides your own guilty heart wanting to believe him." Nina reached over and squeezed my hand once, hard. "I'm not telling you to hate him. I'm telling you not to decide anything at seven in the morning on no sleep, parked outside a building, with your whole future on the table."
I nodded, because she was right and because agreeing with her was easier than admitting how badly some small stupid part of me wanted to run downstairs anyway.
My phone buzzed one more time, and this time it wasn't Julian.
Unknown number: He's not lying about wanting to explain. He's lying about being able to. There's a difference. Please believe that before you do anything permanent.
I turned the phone around so Nina could read it too. Her expression didn't soften. If anything, it hardened further.
"Somebody out there knows exactly what happened in that hotel room," she said slowly, "and they're choosing to feed it to you one crumb at a time instead of just telling you outright. That's not comfort, Amara. That's control. And I want to know who's holding the leash.”
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