Chapter 185 Whitaker Family Watch Group

Chapter 185 Whitaker Family Watch Group
He lunged.

I stumbled backward, the phone still clutched hard in my hand, my back colliding with the edge of the pew hard enough to knock the breath out of me. Josh's hand closed around my wrist, not violent exactly, but desperate, his fingers trembling against my skin.

"Please," he said, his voice cracking, "just give it back, I can explain, I swear I can explain everything if you just—"

"Get off me," I said, wrenching my arm free, my heart hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat.

The chapel door burst open.

"Guys, you will not believe what I just—" Beth stopped dead in the doorway, phone still raised in front of her face, her sentence dying mid-word. "I saw Elder Ezekiel and the religious Police leaving the parking lot a few minutes ago, and I thought you'd want to—"

Her eyes finally lifted from her screen and landed on the scene in front of her — Josh's hand still half-extended toward me, my own hand clutching his phone like a weapon, both of us breathing hard, the chapel practically vibrating with tension.

Her jaw dropped.

"What the fuck is going on here," she said, her voice flat with disbelief.

"Josh's phone," I said, holding it up, my voice shaking. "He's in a group chat. About Pastor Matt. About me. He's been part of it this whole time, Beth, and he lied to my face about it not being anything important."

Beth's eyes moved from me to Josh, something furious and betrayed sliding into place across her features.

"Oh my God, Joshua," she said, his full name landing like a slap in the small chapel.

"I didn't do anything wrong," Josh said quickly, his hands raised now, palms open, the posture of a man trying to slow down a situation already spinning past his control. "I swear, Beth, it's not what it looks like."

"Then let us look," Beth said, stepping fully into the chapel now, closing the distance between them with a fury I'd never seen from her before. "If it's really nothing, Josh, let us go through the whole thing. Every message. Right now."

"Beth—"

"Since apparently you've got nothing to lose," she pressed, "let us see it."

Josh's jaw worked, something desperate and cornered flickering across his face.

"FINE," he yelled suddenly, the word tearing out of him with a rawness that made both of us flinch. "FUCK. Fine. Look at it. Look at all of it."

Beth crossed to my side, and together we scrolled through the thread, both of us leaning over the screen.

The thread wasn't about me at all, I realized slowly, scrolling upward. Not directly. It was about Pastor Matt.

'He hasn't addressed the congregation once since the arrest. Not a single sermon acknowledging any of it.'

'My parents want answers. If he's not going to explain himself publicly, someone needs to force the issue.'

'Chloe says there's a way to get him to respond. Through his family. If we can get Abby to ask him directly, on the record, he can't dodge it the way he's been dodging everyone else.'

Beth's breath caught audibly beside me.

'Use Abby,' someone had written. 'She's the only one he can't stonewall completely. She's family. If she asks and he refuses to answer her, that tells the whole congregation everything they need to know.'

"This is from weeks ago," Beth said, pointing at a timestamp, her voice tight. "Josh, this predates the blog posts entirely. You've been in this from before any of it started."

I kept scrolling, my hands shaking now, piecing the timeline together properly for the first time. "This started right after the second blog post," I said. "The one implying he bought his freedom. That's when it turned strategic."

Further down, a name jumped out at me.

Elder Ezekiel says the congregation deserves transparency. He's the one who suggested approaching it through the family first, before escalating to the board formally.'

"He orchestrated this," I said, my voice going hollow. "The whole thing tonight. Ezekiel didn't come to that chapel to threaten me with some devastating secret. He came because Chloe told him what she was planning, and he wanted to see for himself whether I'd actually go along with it."

Near the very bottom, the most recent messages, timestamped only minutes ago — sent while I'd still been standing in this exact chapel, arguing with Chloe and Leah face to face.

'She refused tonight. Wouldn't confront him. We need another approach.'

'Maybe we don't need her cooperation,' Leah had written. 'Maybe we just need her presence. If she's seen publicly siding with her stepfather, refusing to demand accountability, that says something too. Either she helps expose the truth, or she becomes part of the cover-up in the congregation's eyes. There's no version where she stays neutral.'

I read that line twice, the trap of it settling cold in my chest, and Beth beside me made a small, disgusted sound in her throat.

"They built a story where you lose no matter what you do," she said quietly. "That's not accountability. That's cruelty with a Bible verse stapled to it."

Then my eyes caught it — a pinned message at the very top of the thread, set there deliberately, visible every single time anyone opened the chat.

'Group name: Whitaker Family Watch.'

I stared at those two words for a long moment, something cold and hollow spreading through my chest.

Family.

I realized, distantly, that this was the first time in weeks, maybe the first time since I'd woken up in that hospital bed with no memory of any of them, that I'd actually let myself think of the Whitakers as my family.

Not Pastor Matt's family.

Not some strange, complicated household I'd been dropped into.

Mine.

And the first time I'd let that word settle honestly in my chest, it arrived already weaponized, already turned into a surveillance project run by people I'd trusted.

The taste of it was bitter in a way I hadn't expected.

I looked up from the phone, my eyes finding Josh's face across the small chapel.

"Why," I said quietly.

Just that. One word, small and devastating, hanging in the silence between us.