Chapter 184 Suspicious Josh

Chapter 184 Suspicious Josh

I stared at Dan's message for a long moment, the chapel around me still holding the last echoes of Chloe's threats and Elder Ezekiel's hollow non-answer.

'I've been keeping something from you. It's about why I really came back to this town.'

My thumb hovered over the reply box.

"Who is it?" Josh asked quietly, watching my face.

"Nobody," I said, closing the message thread before he could see it properly, tucking my phone against my chest like I could physically shield it from him. "It's nothing important."

Something flickered across his expression — surprise, maybe, or the particular hurt of being deliberately shut out, though he didn't push. He just nodded slowly and looked away, giving me the privacy I'd asked for without asking for it directly.

I typed a quiet reply to Dan under the cover of my own lap. 'What is it?'

The response came almost immediately, like he'd been sitting there with his phone in hand, waiting.

'Not over text. I need to tell you in person. I don't want you finding out from anyone else before I've had the chance to explain it myself.'

'Tomorrow,' I typed back finally. 'Come find me tomorrow. I need to know everything.'

'Understood,' Dan replied. 'Get some rest tonight, Abby. Whatever you hear before then, don't believe it until you've heard it from me directly.'

I read that line twice, something cold settling low in my stomach, and set the phone face-down on the pew beside me, unwilling to examine the strange dread it left behind too closely.

It was Josh's phone that broke the silence next.

It buzzed once against his leg, then again almost immediately, then a third time in rapid succession, just like the particular urgency of a phone receiving something it desperately wanted its owner's attention on. 

He glanced down at it, and something shifted in his posture instantly, a tension I hadn't seen from him even during the worst of tonight's chaos.

He didn't reach for it.

"You should probably check that," I said, watching him carefully. "It sounds important."

"It's fine," he said, too quickly, his hand pressing flat against his own thigh, deliberately not moving toward his pocket. "Probably just my mom checking in."

The phone buzzed again. And again, three more times in close succession, the vibration audible even through the fabric of his jeans.

"That's a lot of check-ins," I said slowly.

"Group chat notifications," he said. "You know how church group chats get. Everyone piling on at once."

"Which group chat," I said. "Because I'm in a few church group chats myself, Josh, and none of them have ever buzzed like that. Like something urgent. Like something happening in real time."

"It's the youth congregation one," he admitted, too fast, like the words had slipped free before he could stop them. Then, seeing my face, he added quickly, "It's not what you think."

"How would you know what I think?"

He didn't have an answer for that.

Something about the careful, rehearsed evenness of his voice made my skin prickle. I'd heard that exact tone before tonight — from Chloe, from Elder Ezekiel, from every single adult who'd stood in front of me this past week and delivered a lie smoothed flat enough to sound almost true.

"Check your phone, Josh."

"Abby, please, just—" He shifted the phone slightly further from my line of sight, an instinctive, guilty motion he seemed to realize too late had given him away.

"You just did the thing," I said slowly. "The thing guilty people do. You moved it away from me before you even finished your sentence."

"That's not—" He stopped himself, exhaling hard. "It's complicated."

"Everything in my life is complicated lately," I said. "I'm getting real tired of that word."

"Abby, it's really not—"

"Check it," I said again, sharper now, some old, hard-won instinct rising in my chest. "Or I will."

"You don't understand," he said, voice dropping low, almost pleading now. "If you see this the wrong way, out of context, it's going to make everything so much worse. Please, Abby. Just trust me for five more minutes."

"I trusted you an hour ago too," I said. "Look where that got me."

His jaw tightened. He didn't move.

I reached for it before he could stop me.

He lunged half a second too late, his fingers grazing my wrist, but I'd already pulled the phone free, already turning the screen toward myself, already reading the notification banner stacked three deep across his lock screen.

My own name sat right there in the preview text.

'Abby's getting suspicious. We need to move faster before she figures out—'

My stomach dropped straight through the floor.

"Josh." My voice came out low, shaking. "What is this?"

My eyes moved further down the lock screen, catching a second preview beneath the first, the sender's name cut off but the words still visible.

'...she can't find out we're the ones who...'

I didn't get to finish reading it. The screen dimmed, timing out, my thumb instinctively pressing the button to wake it again, my hands shaking too hard to make the motion smooth.

"Abby, give it back, please, I can explain—"

"WHAT IS THIS?" The words tore out of me louder than I meant them to, echoing off the chapel's stone walls, my hands trembling so badly the phone nearly slipped from my grip.

He was still fumbling for words, his mouth opening and closing without anything coherent coming out, his face gone pale and desperate.

"Give me your pin," I said, my voice shaking with fury now instead of fear. "I want to see the whole conversation. Every single message."

"Abby—"

I swiped the screen up myself before he could stop me, bracing for a passcode prompt.

None came. It unlocked instantly, straight to the home screen, no security at all standing between me and whatever he'd been so desperate to keep hidden.

"Wow," I said, something bitter and disbelieving twisting through my voice despite everything. "No passcode. That's either incredibly trusting or incredibly stupid, Josh, and right now I genuinely can't tell which."

The moment the words left my mouth, something in his face changed completely — the careful, desperate apology draining away into something else entirely, something harder and faster and far more frightening.

He lunged.