Mark had been to hell and back with Justin multiple times since the kid turned up on his doorstep. Hell, his very welcome of them was to spew all other Mark's feet. At that point, Gen had understandably freaked out and questioned everything. Mark never judged her for that, but it was those initial moments where he hadn't remotely had a choice to back away and analyse the situation. The kid was his son. Well, either his son or Sam's, because he looked so much like him. Sam had never been promiscuous or slept around, so it wasn't even a possibility. Mark had taken Justin in and been determined to care for him no matter what. The kid was his son, and he was sick and in a really bad mess. It hadn't taken long for him to realise that there was something much deeper at play than just a delinquent kid who abused booze and drugs. He was absolutely screaming out for help, and with the right medical attention, the mental illness diagnosis had come. Even then, it was only gradual and piecemeal that Justin began to revealed traumas of his past. Mark remembered questioning Nathan about the possibility that Justin was being so secretive. It was Nathan who said that it was unlikely Justin was being secretive, and much more likely he was blocking things out in his past. It was something young people often did, especially mentally ill kids. He told Mark that over time, more things might come to light and warned him to be prepared for it. Nothing could have prepared any of them for this. "We can't keep holding on to the anger because it's going to spill over onto him. Like Ali said, the only way he's going to know it's okay to not be okay is if he sees that we're not either. But on the same token, he can't see that we're continuously angry either because he'll react to that too. You have to let it go."

The anger for him was dissipating for that very reason, but he couldn't shed the grief or the nauseating sickness inside from what had been in that statement Justin had made. There had been an attempt from the cunt's legal defence to try to say Justin was lying and making up stories, like he always did for attention. That he had a lengthy history of attention-seeking. That had been the nail in the coffin for the presiding judge. She chose to throw the book at them and now Justin's mother had a very lengthy jail sentence to serve and she couldn't get to him at all. "I know that. I do. But I have a hell of a lot to work through and I'm not dealing with any of it. At all. But I've made an urgent appointment with my therapist, and I've set up a session for all three of us to see Justin's therapist together so he can have a chance to open up about what he said in the statement if he wants to. I fucked up. I know I did. But I needed to shut down. I couldn't handle the pain. It's the worse pain I've ever felt in my life. Even above and beyond when I was told Jim was dead."