Chapter 7
Chapter 7:
Bridget Nolan stood on Lara’s doorstep holding the Beaumont Award the way a hostage negotiator holds a phone — with leverage, not generosity.
The trophy was beautiful. Hand-blown crystal, shaped like a rising wave, with Lara’s name etched into the base in a typeface that probably cost someone three hours to select. It caught the hallway light and threw small rainbows across Bridget’s collarbones, which was a nice touch — unintentional, but Bridget had always been lucky with lighting.
She wasn’t handing it over.
Instead, she stood in the doorway, biting her lower lip — the same lip that had trembled on cue during the birthday party, during the power outage phone call, during every performance she’d staged over the past month — and clutched the trophy against her chest like a child refusing to share a toy she’d found in someone else’s garden.
“Lala, the director asked me to bring this to you.” Bridget’s voice was sugar dissolving in warm water — sweet, slow, with the faintest edge of something that hadn’t quite melted. “It’s such a prestigious award. You’re amazing, really p>
A beat. Then:
“I know this is awkward to ask, but… I’ve never won anything like this.
Could I maybe borrow it? Just for a few days? To keep at home? For motivation p>
Lara stared at her.
In her twenty-eight years of existence, Lara had received many unusual requests.
Clients had asked her to redesign entire collections overnight. Her mother had once asked her to choose a wedding dress from six thousand miles away via blurry video call.
Declan had asked her to time his laps at a racetrack while she was running a fever.
But no one — no one — had ever asked to borrow an award. You might as well ask to borrow someone’s diploma. Or their dental records. The request was so perfectly, outrageously shameless that for a moment Lara almost admired the craftsmanship of it.
Almost.
“Bridget,” Lara said, and the smile she produced was the careful, controlled kind — the kind that sits on a face like a locked gate, “if you know it’s shameless to ask, then maybe don’t ask. If you want a Beaumont, earn one p>
She reached for the trophy.
Bridget’s face went through three colors in rapid succession — white, pink, white again — and her expression rearranged itself into something wounded and bewildered, the face of a woman who had simply been trying to do something nice and had been punished for it.
“Lala, how can you say that? I’m not asking to keep it. I just wanted it for inspiration p>
Lara’s hands closed around the crystal base.
Bridget’s arms tightened.
For one absurd moment they were both gripping the trophy in the hallway like two shoppers fighting over the last discounted handbag on Black Friday, and the sheer ridiculousness of the scene — two grown women in a tug-of-war over an award that bore only one of their names — might have been funny if it weren’t so infuriating.
Then the trophy slipped.
It fell the way expensive things fall — slowly, almost gracefully, turning once in the air before meeting the hardwood floor with a sound like a chandelier committing suicide.
Crystal everywhere. Shards and splinters and dust, scattered across the hallway in a glittering constellation of what had once been three months of Lara’s best work, made solid, made beautiful, and now made into a thousand irreparable pieces.
Lara didn’t move. She stood at the epicenter of the wreckage, shards crunching faintly under her slippers, and stared at the space where her award had been.
The timing of what happened next was — like everything involving Bridget — impeccable.
Callum and Declan materialized from somewhere behind her. The living room, maybe, or the garage — it didn’t matter. What mattered was that they appeared at the precise moment Bridget needed them to appear, which was the moment she was surrounded by broken glass with a scratch on her shin and an expression of terrified innocence that could have won its own award.
“Bridget p>
They converged on her like a medical team responding to a code.
Callum knelt, lifting the hem of her skirt to examine a thin red line on her calf — a scratch, really, the kind you’d get from a bramble bush on a country walk — and his face darkened as though he’d discovered a compound fracture.
“I’m taking you to the hospital p>
He scooped her up before she could protest — the full bridal carry, both arms, Bridget’s hand finding his shoulder with the instinctive accuracy of someone who’d been carried before — and strode toward the front door.
Declan lingered. He surveyed the destruction on the floor, and when he looked up at Lara, his expression carried the particular self-righteousness of a man who had already decided who was guilty before entering the room.
“You already have everything, Lara.
Everything. Why do you have to fight with Bridget over stuff like this p>
The word “stuff” landed like a slap.
“It’s my trophy.” Lara’s voice shook. She hated that it shook. She wanted it to be steel, to be ice, to be something that couldn’t be dismissed. Instead it came out raw and cracked, like a window that had been hit but not yet broken. “Three months of work. My design. My name on the base. She wouldn’t let go of it, and you’re telling me I was competing with her p>
She pointed at the shards on the floor. Her hand was trembling. She couldn’t make it stop.
“She broke my award. I want her to apologize p>
Declan’s jaw tightened.
For a moment — the briefest flicker, gone before it could be acknowledged — something shifted behind his eyes.
Doubt, maybe. Or the ghost of a memory: Lara at twenty-two, showing him her first published design, her face lit up with the kind of pride that doesn’t know yet that it can be taken away.
But the flicker died, and what replaced it was anger — simpler, louder, easier.
“It’s a trophy, Lara.
A thing. There are thousands of them. You can’t compare a piece of glass to a person.
Bridget is hurt — because of you — and you’re the one who should be apologizing p>
He turned and walked out the door.
Lara stood alone in the hallway. The crystal dust glittered under the overhead light, throwing the same small rainbows it had thrown across Bridget’s collarbones, but now there was no one left to catch them.