Chapter 8
Chapter 8:
The silence after they left was the loudest thing in the house.
Lara stood in the hallway for what might have been thirty seconds or five minutes — time had gone slippery, the way it does after something breaks — and Declan’s words circled in her skull like a dog chasing its tail. You should be apologizing. You should be apologizing. You should be—
She looked down.
There was blood on the floor.
Not a lot. Not dramatically. Just a thin, steady line of it running from a gash on her left shin, tracking down her ankle, pooling in the groove between the floorboards. The cut was long — longer and deeper than the scratch on Bridget’s calf, though no one had been present to kneel and examine it, no one had offered to carry her to the hospital, no one had noticed at all.
Lara noticed it now only because the pain had finally arrived, several minutes late, like a guest who’d been waiting for the commotion to die down before making an entrance.
She exhaled. Then she went to the kitchen, found the dustpan, came back, and swept up the remains of the Beaumont Award. The shards made a sound like wind chimes as they tumbled into the bin. She mopped the blood — hers — from the hallway floor. She washed the mop. She dried her hands. Then she sat on the edge of the bathtub, peeled back the fabric of her trouser leg, and cleaned the wound herself, hissing through her teeth at the sting of antiseptic.
No one came to check on her.
She bandaged the cut with the efficient detachment of someone who’d been patching herself up for a while — longer than the past month, maybe. Longer than Bridget. Perhaps since the first time she’d realized that being loved by two people didn’t necessarily mean being looked after by either of them.
That night, alone in her room with the door closed and the house settling into its usual silence, Lara’s phone buzzed with messages from Dorothy.
Photos. Six of them. Wedding dresses, each displayed against the same ivory backdrop, each tagged with a designer name and a price that Dorothy had diplomatically cropped out. They ranged from minimalist — a column of white silk, almost severe — to extravagant — a confection of lace and tulle that looked like it had been designed for a woman who planned to arrive at her wedding by horse-drawn carriage.
Lara scrolled through them slowly, her bandaged leg propped on a pillow, and felt the strange dislocation of shopping for a wedding dress to marry a man she’d never met while sitting in a house owned by two men who’d forgotten she had blood.
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She called Dorothy.
“The third one,” she said, without preamble. “The one with the high neckline p>
“Oh, that’s a lovely choice — but Lala, you sound exhausted. What’s going on p>
The question was gentle.
Gentle was dangerous.
Gentle was the thing that could crack the composure Lara had been holding together with both hands and a considerable amount of stubbornness.
She blinked. Her eyes stung. She pressed the heel of her palm against one eye socket and focused on the pressure until the stinging stopped.
“I’m fine, Mom. I should be able to wrap everything up here within the week. How are the preparations going p>
They were in the middle of discussing catering — Dorothy had opinions about catering the way generals have opinions about strategy — when the front door opened downstairs.
Two sets of footsteps. One precise, one heavy.
Callum and Declan, back from their mercy mission.
Lara didn’t lower her voice quickly enough.
“— so I’ll be there in time.
Don’t worry.
Everything’s on schedule for the wedding p>
The footsteps stopped.
“Wedding?” Callum’s voice drifted up the stairwell, sharp with sudden attention. “What wedding p>
“Whose wedding?” Declan added, appearing in Lara’s doorway before she’d had time to register that she’d been overheard.
Lara stared at her phone. She couldn’t remember pressing the end-call button, but the screen was dark.
Dorothy was gone. It was just her and two men and a word — wedding — hanging in the air between them like smoke.
She steadied herself. It took three heartbeats.
“A friend of mine is getting married,” she said. The lie came out smooth and easy, which should have alarmed her but instead felt like a small mercy. “In Thornfield. Would you want to come p>
She asked because the answer was already obvious. She asked the way you press on a bruise — not because you expect it to feel good, but because you need to confirm it still hurts.
Callum and Declan exchanged a glance — the wordless, microsecond communication of two men who’d known each other long enough to hold entire conversations with their eyebrows.
“No,” Callum said. “Go by yourself. I’ve got the quarterly board meeting and a restructuring proposal that—” He stopped himself. Simplified. “I’m busy p>
He withdrew to the study, closing the door behind him with the definitive click of a man who considered the conversation finished.
Declan stayed in the doorway a moment longer. His arms were crossed. His jaw was doing the thing it did when he wanted to say something righteous.
“Bridget got hurt today.
Because of you.” Each word was placed deliberately, like bricks. “You should go apologize. Until you do, I’m not interested in going to anyone’s wedding p>
He left. His door closed. The hallway was empty.
Lara sat on the bed with her phone in her lap and her bandaged leg stretched out before her and laughed — a single, quiet exhale through her nose, the kind of laugh that isn’t really a laugh at all but the sound a person makes when the alternative is something they’re not ready to do.
An apology. They wanted her to apologize.
For a trophy with her name on it.
For a cut on Bridget’s leg that was smaller than the one on her own.
For the crime of existing in a space where Bridget needed her to be absent.
She didn’t sleep well. She rarely did anymore.
When dawn came — gray and uncommitted, the kind of Halcombe morning that couldn’t decide between rain and sunshine — Lara got up, washed her face, rebandaged her leg, and went downstairs to make breakfast.
She smelled the flowers before she saw them.
Roses. Lilies. Lavender. Wildflowers she couldn’t name. They were everywhere — on the dining table, the console, the kitchen counter, the windowsills — arranged in mismatched vases like a florist’s shop had detonated in the living room. Petals were scattered across surfaces like confetti after a parade no one had invited her to.
The pollen hit her throat first. Then her lungs.
Lara’s hand went to her chest.