"NORA, WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?"

Even as her grip tightened around the phone, Jen tried not to let her voice reveal how frightened she'd suddenly become. In her periphery, she saw Robert abruptly sit up at the mention of their boss' name.

"I'm going to need you to listen to me and not panic."

Uneasiness bubbled up further and further into her throat. "Telling me not to panic isn't going to help me not panic," Jen attempted to point out calmly, but her voice trembled.

Robert got up and started towards her, but she held up her hand to stop him from getting too close—the absolute last thing they needed right now was for Nora to hear him in the background of her call.

"It's your dad." She said it straightforwardly, which felt like both a blessing and a curse. "He's–"

"My dad?!" Jen stopped her. "Why are you with my dad?!"

The anxiety that had pooled in her stomach abruptly doubled over, making her feel as though she might be sick. She swallowed the moisture in her mouth and attempted to silently, slowly inhale. Take this one breath at a time, she told herself. But what in the world was going on?

"Jen, I can't explain if you're going to keep interrupting me." Nora's voice, too, was slightly wobbly. And Nora's voice didn't get wobbly unless something was very wrong, so hearing it was worse than it would have been to listen to her be irritated. "Of course I'm not with him on purpose. I just–I just saw it. I was down on McCann Street on my way out from dinner with one of my friends and there was a man crossing the street and then out of nowhere...it was a hit and run."

Those six words were all it took for Jen's world to suddenly tilt on its axis, for her feet to feel like they could no longer hold her and her lungs to feel like they could no longer support her with the oxygen she needed. Her universe might have only shifted by a few degrees, but to a being as fragile as she was, it felt catastrophic.

"You're saying my dad got hit by a car?!"

Robert's hand on her shoulder – she hadn't even noticed him close the distance between them and put it there – was the only thing keeping her steady. And though she could not dare to look at him out of fear that she might burst into tears the second she met his eyes, she could not bring herself to shake him off, either.

Not again. I can't do this again. Please, God, not again.

"We ran over while my friend dialed 911. That was when I realized who it was."

There was a lot of background noise coming from Nora's end of the line, and Jen's heart tightened in her chest as she wondered where she was making this call from. She sucked in a little breath that she didn't realize was audible until Nora continued talking.

"I need you to breathe, Jen. He's going to be okay," she said in a voice as comforting as hers ever got. "He was alert and talking to me—he said he was on his way to see you."

To see her. This was because of her.

"Like I said, don't panic, but you should come to the hospital."

Jen was very much panicking, gripping the phone as tightly as she could to stop herself from trembling. Her head was spinning, she could barely tell up apart from down, and yet she managed to hiccup, "Okay. Okay, I'm coming," before she hung the phone up.

She had thought it would be game over once the call ended, that she would immediately collapse into tears. Miraculously, she managed to hold it in and straighten her shoulders. She was a grown-up this time. She could do this.

She didn't have a choice.

She turned to her boyfriend, who was looking at her with wide eyes. "I need you to take me to the hospital."

Their ride to the ER was mostly comprised of Jen holding onto Robert's hand for dear life and him attempting to soothe her and drive at the same time. She relayed to him what Nora had told her on the phone, but after that, he asked surprisingly few questions. He probably knew that she couldn't make herself talk any more.

But on the inside, she was spiraling, her brain going round and round in maddening circles like a carousel that couldn't stop. What if things took a sudden turn for the worst? That was somewhat common with car accidents, wasn't it? He could have internal bleeding, or brain damage...

What if the last thing she ever said to him was that his life meant nothing?

And why, why did it have to be Nora of all people who was there to witness this? What if the last person he ever saw was one of the few in this world that he hated?

By the time Robert was sharply swerving the car into the parking lot, Jen had lost all of that calm she thought she'd mustered up. As soon as they halted in a space, she threw her door open and stormed towards the large, glass doors without even checking if he was following her.

She remembered these doors. She remembered her feet running this same path towards them when the boy who had driven her here was Dean Holloway and not Robert, her feet hitting the asphalt so hard it made her ankles ache and her blood pounding through her veins so fast they felt like they would burst.

She remembered scrunching her eyes shut when they were hit with this bright, harsh light, so unnaturally bright that she thought it could be from the afterlife.

How fitting that she'd always thought Nora looked a little bit like an angel.

But she didn't want to see an angel right now. She was waiting right inside the entrance, still wearing the dress and heels she'd worn out to dinner and looking only mildly mussed. Jen moved to grab her, to do anything, and the voice that came out of her own mouth sounded like a stranger's. "Nora, what the hell? Why did you come h–"

A familiar but firm set of arms was suddenly wound around her, pulling her back towards him and prying her away from Nora. "Jen, don't– What do you think you're doing?!"

Nora's eyes went wide when she saw Robert, and he yanked back from Jen like he'd touched fire.

There goes our cover.

Her eyes were going to and fro from Jen's face to Robert's, and then to his hands that had just been on her. We'll talk about this later, her eyes seemed to say as she quietly cleared her throat.

"I came to make sure he was okay until you got here."

"And since when do you care if he's okay?!" Jen snapped.

"I've always cared!" Nora flared, exasperated. "I'm not the vile person you always make me out to be, Jen."

Her eyes were like ice, and Robert had now taken a couple of steps back from Jen. When she dared to glance at him, she saw that he was looking at their boss with a degree of wariness she had never seen from him.

Another thing Nora rarely did was raise her voice.

Jen watched the movement of his throat as he swallowed. And then, without taking his eyes off of Nora, he quietly said, "I think I'm going to need one of you to explain what exactly is going on here."

She looked to the ground and scrunched her eyes shut for a second, feeling as though she'd just been caged inside her own worst nightmare. Oh God, I've made such a mess. Everything she'd tried to protect herself from was caving in on her at once. She didn't know why she believed she was capable of keeping all these secrets.

They always came out one way or another. They always found their way to the surface, clawing their way out of whatever hole you'd tried to push them in. Hadn't she watched her own mother learn that lesson the hard way? Jen was prideful and foolish to think that she could have everything under her control, and Fate apparently wanted to give her a harsh reminder of that.

She curtly jerked her head towards the doors, indicating that the two of them should step outside. Her heart was sprinting in her chest as they walked out, and she could feel Nora's eyes on them as they did, but she pretended to be as calm and collected as she possibly could be in a moment like this. It wasn't until they were out the doorway and had stepped several feet to the side – completely out of Nora's eyeshot – that Jen allowed herself to stop.

Lacing her fingers together, she resisted the compulsion to look down to the ground in shame. Now that they were here, she felt like she had greatly betrayed Robert by concealing all of this from him. Would he have wanted to risk being together if he'd known that Nora and Jen were already on such convoluted terms? She imagined she was about to find out.

He was silently waiting for her to say something, anything. The corners of his lips were pulled down with worry, and even in the midst of such chaos, she badly wished that she could get on tiptoe and kiss them for comfort instead of doing what she was about to do.

"I'm about to attempt to cram a very long story into a very short amount of time," she said simply. "So please just let me talk. I promise I'll answer all of your questions later, I just...I was scared of telling you."

"Tell me what?" He softly shook his head. "Whatever this is that you've been keeping from me, I've been able to tell that it's important. I just want to understand."

Her stomach clenched—had he been able to tell this whole time? Did he already know she was a liar?

"It's not that I don't trust you–"

He quietly sighed. "It does feel a little bit like that, Jen."

Something like tears prodded at the back of her eyes, but she couldn't allow herself to melt down before she'd even told him anything. Before she'd even seen her dad.

"I told you that my mom got into a really bad car accident four years ago."

He nodded.

"What I didn't tell you was why she was even in Chicago in the first place." Breathe in, breathe out. The more straightforwardly she could explain it, the better. "I learned that during my internship the year before, she started having an affair with my boss. She was here to see him that night. It was late, and it was New Year's Eve, and they were both a little bit drunk..."

She swallowed down the sting in her throat that always rose if she thought too hard about that night. "He was the one that was driving the car, but it was the passenger side that got hit. He walked away from it with just some cuts and bruises, but she had a brain bleed that caused some amnesia. She still doesn't remember that she even knew him."

For some reason, Jen could not bring herself to look at Robert's face. Whether it was guilt or out of fear that it would make her cry, she didn't know, but the only way she could think of to keep herself intact was to stare ahead as numbly as possible.

To be happy was better than to be numb, but being numb was better than being broken. If there was anything that the past four years had taught her, it was that.

She barely heard him murmur her name.

"And there's one more thing," she said, her voice now sounding very small. "His name...it's Victor Ambrose."

Her words hung untethered in the humid air as he soundlessly took a moment to follow with what she was saying. But when it did, she heard his voice catch.

"Ambrose..." he said in disbelief, faltering at the end. "You can't mean Nora's–"

"–Dad," Jen finished.

And then cried. One second, she'd felt like she was managing to hold it all inside, and then the next, her cheeks were suddenly wet with angry, hot tears. She was vaguely aware that she was making some sort of weird sniffling noise and then much more aware of him wrapping his arms around her, holding her tight and whispering, "Shhh, Jen, I've got you. You're okay. You're okay."

"It was terrible," she hiccuped, her heart ripping into pieces all over again even amidst the relief that came with getting it off her chest. All that remained bottled up inside her was rapidly spilling out, and it registered somewhere far in the back of her mind that this was the first time she was sharing this whole truth with anyone else. "He has all this money and was trying to keep us quiet with it so that we didn't mess up his reputation and I–I was the one who had to deal with all of it because my dad always got too angry with all of us. All my dreams of getting a job there after graduation went out the window and I let him make me stay silent and Nora, she– when we met, I found out she had her suspicions all along. She could have stopped it, Robert, she could have–"

He pulled her back from the cusp of hyperventilation, drawing her even closer to him still. "Shh, my sweet Jen. You don't have to tell me everything right now."

All she had the strength to do at that very second was nod with the little energy she could muster, letting him cradle her in his arms for a long moment. In the distance, she heard the wail of sirens, but it all felt like it was a world away. The sky above them was dark, so dark that it barely made a difference when she closed her eyes and rested her face against the hollow of his neck. She tried to soothe herself by listening to the steady beating of his heart, by resting her palms flat against the warmth of his shirt instead of letting her fingers curl into anxious fists.

"You should go see your dad," he eventually whispered to her, and she knew that he was right. Telling him about her family's connection to Nora was only the first half of tonight's battles.

Jen rubbed at her weary eyes to make herself feel slightly less awkward about going back in even though it would still be blatantly obvious that she'd been crying. She wished that she could cling to Robert's hand for support as they went inside, but until she was one-hundred percent certain that Nora had already made her conclusions about them, she refused to add any more fuel to the fire. Though she was beginning to accept that she herself would most likely be in a lot of trouble, she couldn't kill her desire to make any last-ditch efforts to protect Robert from retribution. She should have kept him out of this; she should have found another way to get here.

Yet in a way, she felt as though she'd had no choice but to bring him. She wasn't strong enough to do this without someone by her side.

When they returned to the lobby, Nora was speaking in hushed tones to a police officer, who jotted notes down on a small notepad. Fury rose up in Jen's chest – whoever had done this to her father deserved to be behind bars – but she reminded herself that she wouldn't have anything useful to tell the police. Nora was the one who was there, not her.

He was on his way to see her.

He was on his way to see her.

Sorrow billowed up in her again and Robert, seeing that his girlfriend was swaying slightly and might burst at the mildest provocation, gently guided her over to the nearest nurse's station and asked if someone could take her to her father. Moments later, Jen was silently following a chipper woman named Elaine down the hall. She glanced back once at Robert, who gave her an encouraging nod. When Nurse Elaine rattled off something about how her father would be happy to see her, Jen forced herself to give a weak smile.

This isn't like last time. This isn't like last time. They're all saying he's fine.

Even so, given their family's history, she was reluctant to believe anything in full until she saw it with her own eyes. The hall felt labyrinthine, but once Jen finally caught sight of her dad sitting up in his bed, an unexpected, strangled noise somewhere between a sigh of relief and a sob escaped from her throat. "Dad–"

She ran over to take his hand – the one that wasn't currently in a sling – in her own and lower herself into the chair at his bedside. To her enormous relief, he appeared to be in decent shape, all things considered—while his arm was bound up and his whole body looked incredibly bruised and sore, it was still infinitely better than the nightmarish state her mother had been in when they found her in this hospital four years ago.

"Hey, sweetheart." His voice was understandably hoarse, but she could find the kindness beneath it nonetheless. His eyebrows furrowed slightly as he looked at her, and she imagined it might be because she looked almost as rough as he did in her upset state.

"I'm okay," he said, confirming her suspicions. "I've got some bruised ribs and a broken arm, but nothing that some bandages and rest can't fix up."

Jen nodded, but she felt her lower lip quivering as she tried to speak through the heaviness that was weighing on her heart. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I was so mean to you and I couldn't forgive myself if–"

"I'm okay," he steadily repeated to shut her spiraling thoughts down. "I'm sorry, too. I was trying to come apologize to you—that was no way for a father to treat his daughter."

He sighed a little bit, then winced as though the effort hurt him. "We both know you get your stubbornness from me and not your mother."

That managed to pull a small laugh out of Jen, to even her own surprise. She wiped at her eyes, which were still damp. "Yeah, I do."

"Speaking of your mother..." Jen's chest tightened as Dad leaned back against his pillow and looked up at the ceiling, his eyes thoughtful. "On the way over here, I was thinking. About life and death and all that other deep stuff you think about when you've just been hit by a car. And I–"

When he paused for a few seconds, she truly had no idea what words were about to follow. But as they did, she started to feel lighter and lighter and lighter.

"–You're going to have to give me some time to figure it out, but...I think I'll try talking to her. About...you know."

Jen's heart leaped in her chest. Had she heard him correctly? Had he finally agreed?

"That's great, Dad," she stammered and held his hand slightly tighter, though she made a conscious effort not to do anything that might accidentally hurt him. "That's really great. If there's anything I can do to help..."

"Well, for the immediate moment...they called your mom and I think Martha – you know, from next door?" Jen nodded; Martha was her parents' neighbor and had been for as long as she could remember. "I think she's driving her down here to see me, so do you mind shooing the Ambrose girl out of here? She did a good thing for me tonight, but I don't really want her around when your mother gets here..."

Jen nodded. "I'll handle it. I love you, Dad."

"I love you, too."

She hesitated to stand up, debating if she should allow the words that were lingering at the tip of her tongue to come out. While we're here, there's someone else you should meet...

But dads were defensive enough when meeting their daughter's boyfriends under regular circumstances and orchestrating that introduction when he was at his weakest was a recipe for no good. They had all dealt with enough surprises for one evening.

So Jen returned to the waiting area (nearly making one or two wrong turns along the way) and found Robert and Nora sitting as far away from each other as physically possible, both looking down at the ground like they could pretend the other didn't exist. That was probably for the best. She awkwardly took the seat next to Nora, receiving an equally shy sideways glance from her.

"I, um. Thanks for making sure he got here," Jen mumbled. "And calling me. I'm, uh, sorry I almost slapped you."

Nora gave her a very tiny, wry smile. "I'll try not to take it personally."

"It was very personal," Jen blurted on instinct, then wanted to smack herself.

Nora's lips pressed into a line. "You never make it very easy to give you the benefit of the doubt."

"Sorry," she grimaced, dropping the volume of her voice even further. "But, um, if I'm already being rude, am I allowed to say that your job here is done? My mom – she's on the way, and, um..."

"Understood," Nora said. "And I need to be at work bright and early tomorrow, so I really ought to get going."

Jen's insides tangled back into a pretzel at the mention of work, but Nora made no comments about Robert before getting up from her chair and escorting herself out. As Jen watched her head of blonde hair disappear out the doors, she couldn't help but wonder what tomorrow held for all of them.

Her footsteps echoed quietly on the vinyl tiles when she got up, but no one around spared her any of their attention – no one but Robert, of course. He lifted his eyes to look at her as she crossed the room to be with him, wilting into the chair at his side and resting her head against his shoulder.

"Dad's okay," she whispered as she reached over and threaded her fingers between his. "Mom's on her way."

"That's good."

"It is," she agreed. "But I don't know how tomorrow's going to go. Our cover's blown. Your job–"

"–Doesn't affect how I feel about you," he interrupted her, his voice softening at the end. He held her hand a little tighter. "Tomorrow will happen however it happens and we will get through it. There is very little in this world that I can promise you, but I can promise you that."

Though her mind was still anxious, her heart calmed at his words, and a little breath of reprieve left her lips. "I might need you to wait in the car while my mom comes," she admitted. "I don't know that this is the right time and place to introduce you..."

"I don't mind waiting in the car," he assured her.

Jen was looking at their interlocked hands, her thumb toying with his. It was good he didn't mind that she could never sit entirely still. "But it's going to take her a little while to get here, so..."

He used the same delicate voice that he did when he was reading to her, or when she was starting to doze off in his arms. "...So?"

"Can you just hold me for a minute?"

She got no verbal response; she didn't need one. Instead, he soundlessly put his arm around her, drawing her as close to him as they could manage in the clunky waiting room seats. Jen tucked herself against his side and closed her eyes as his lips touched her forehead, murmuring something to her so delicately that even she could not make out.

He held her tightly, and for a couple of short minutes, they got to exist in a universe that belonged only to them. 

____________________

A/N:

Just 2 chapters left! I hope you liked this one — had you already figured out that Victor was Nora's dad?

Don't forget to comment and vote!