Chapter 4
Chapter 4:
Lara’s phone lit up at eleven forty-seven, which she knew because she’d been staring at the countdown timer — thirteen days, twenty-one hours, thirteen minutes — when the notification slid across it like an uninvited guest.
Bridget Nolan.
She should have ignored it.
Any therapist, any friend, any person with a functioning sense of self-preservation would have said: put the phone down, Lara.
Go to sleep. You have a resignation letter to finalize and a life to dismantle in thirteen days. You do not need to open a WhatsApp message from the woman who is methodically dismantling your other life.
Lara opened it.
The first message read: “Why don’t you like my post p>
A minute later, a follow-up: “I’m sorry, Lala. I was wrong.
Don’t be angry, okay p>
The apology was the tell.
Bridget never apologized unless she’d done something she was proud of. It was the equivalent of a poker player failing to suppress a smile — a giveaway dressed up as remorse.
Lara tapped through to Bridget’s story.
Nine photos.
Carefully arranged. Professionally lit, or close enough.
The first: a princess gown in cotton-candy pink, spread across what looked like a chaise longue, its skirt billowing outward like a small weather system. The kind of dress that cost more than Lara’s first car and served approximately the same practical function.
The second: crystal shoes. Not glass slippers — actual crystal, studded with what were almost certainly real diamonds, refracting light in a way that made the photo look like it had its own Instagram filter.
A gift from Callum, whose approach to gift-giving had always been less “it’s the thought that counts” and more “it’s the quarterly revenue that counts p>
The third: a cherry-red sports car.
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Declan’s contribution.
Because nothing says “happy birthday to a woman I’ve known for thirty days” like a vehicle worth more than most people’s houses.
And in the center photo — the one the entire grid had been arranged to draw the eye toward — there was Bridget. Standing between Callum and Declan, one hand on each man’s arm, her smile so sweet it could have caused a cavity at twenty paces.
The caption read: “Yay, today I was also a princess p>
Also.
That word sat in Lara’s chest like a thumbtack.
Also a princess.
As if the position had been occupied by someone else, and Bridget was merely borrowing the crown.
As if the comparison were accidental.
There was nothing accidental about Bridget Nolan.
Six months ago — even six weeks ago — Lara would have felt the hot prickle of something she didn’t want to name. Jealousy was an ugly word. Possessiveness was worse.
But there was no pretty word for the feeling of watching two men who’d built their lives around you suddenly discover they had a second architect.
But tonight, sitting cross-legged on a bed she’d be sleeping in for only thirteen more nights, Lara felt something unexpected: relief.
She tapped the screen. Left a heart on the post. The little animation bloomed red and vanished, and it felt less like approval and more like a period at the end of a very long sentence.
From now on, Callum and Declan were Bridget’s problem.
And Bridget was welcome to the whole complicated mess of them — the overprotectiveness, the rivalry, the risotto competitions, the way they’d both show up at your door at midnight if you so much as sneezed into the phone. Welcome to it.
All of it.
Enjoy.
Lara put her phone face-down on the nightstand, rolled onto her side, and closed her eyes.
She slept better than she had in months.
The next morning, she drove to the office, submitted her resignation in a manila envelope she’d addressed by hand — because there was something satisfying about the formality, like sealing a letter to a former life — and drove home without looking back.
Then she pulled out the photo albums.
There were fourteen of them. Thick, cloth-bound, the kind you bought at specialty shops that smelled of leather and nostalgia. They filled an entire shelf in the hallway closet, arranged chronologically, spine-labeled in Lara’s meticulous handwriting: Halcombe, Year 1. Halcombe, Year 2.
All the way to Halcombe, Year 20.
She carried them to the living room in stacks of three and spread them across the floor like evidence in a case she was about to close.
The first album fell open to a photograph of three children on a beach. Lara, maybe seven, all knees and elbows and oversized sunglasses, flanked by a gap-toothed Callum and a Declan whose hair was doing something architectural in the sea breeze. They were grinning at the camera with the unselfconscious ferocity of children who hadn’t yet learned that happiness could be complicated.
She turned the page. High school.
Award ceremonies.
Callum in a blazer that was too big for him, holding a math trophy with the awkward pride of a teenager who hadn’t yet grown into his ambition.
Declan beside him, tie loosened, holding a different trophy — something sports-related, naturally — and making a face at the camera that would later become his signature look on magazine covers.
And Lara between them.
Always between them.
University trips.
Callum looking uncomfortable at a beach party.
Declan looking comfortable everywhere. Lara laughing in a way she didn’t entirely recognize — head thrown back, mouth open, the kind of laugh that came from a place that had since been quietly boarded up.
Twenty years of photographs. Twenty years of evidence that once, before Bridget Nolan and her trembling lip and her steamed buns and her crystal shoes, these three people had been the center of each other’s worlds.
Lara closed the last album.
Then she went to the kitchen and found a box of matches.