Chapter 15
Chapter 15:
The apartment was dark when she got home. She moved through it without turning on the lights — she knew the layout by touch now, every corner and threshold, the way you know a body you’ve lived in — and sat on the edge of her bed, still in her coat, shoes still on.
Her phone rang.
She didn’t need to check the screen. The ringtone — a particular synthetic chirp she’d assigned to Bridget’s number, half as an organizational measure and half as an early warning system — told her everything.
“Lala!” Bridget’s voice poured through the speaker like honey over a knife — sweet, slow, with an edge that only revealed itself if you were paying attention. “Tonight was so wonderful. I went to the Hargrove house and the Thorne house, and everyone was so kind to me p>
A theatrical pause.
Bridget was good at theatrical pauses.
“Callum’s mother brought out the family jewelry. The heirloom set — the one they keep in the safe? She said she wanted me to have it.” Another pause. “And Declan’s father gave me this incredible jade pendant that’s been in the family for three generations.
Do you think that means p>
She trailed off, letting the implication hang in the air like perfume — unmistakable, designed to linger, impossible to ignore without acknowledging its presence.
Lara stared at the ceiling. In the darkness, the plaster looked like the surface of a still lake: flat, gray, unremarkable.
“I’m not interested in their affairs,” Lara said. Her voice was level — not cold, not warm, just level. The voice of a woman who had already closed a door and was speaking through it. “You don’t need to report to me, Bridget. It has nothing to do with me p>
She hung up. Set the phone face-down on the nightstand. Removed her shoes.
Got into bed.
She did not cry. She wanted to note that, even if only to herself. She did not cry.
The next morning — her last full day in Halcombe, a fact that felt both enormous and strangely weightless — Lara got dressed, packed her final items, and went to meet the only real friend Callum and Declan had ever allowed her to keep.
Patricia Chen was a force of nature disguised as a tax attorney.
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Five foot three, built like a sparrow, with a voice that could silence a boardroom and an opinion on everything that she delivered with the cheerful aggression of someone who had never once considered the possibility that she might be wrong. She was Lara’s oldest friend in Halcombe — her only friend, really, if you subtracted the acquaintances and the colleagues and the people who smiled at her in the elevator — and the reason she’d survived was that Patricia was too stubborn for Callum and Declan to eliminate.
Because they had tried. Oh, they had tried.
In their youth, their possessiveness had been a living thing — sprawling, territorial, with teeth. They hadn’t just screened Lara’s boyfriends (there were none; the boys who tried to pass love letters were dealt with before the ink dried). They’d screened her friendships.
Filtered her social life. Vetted her weekend plans with the thoroughness of a security detail.
“Lala,” they’d say, with matching expressions of wounded innocence, “aren’t we enough for you? You’re so wonderful that even girls could fall in love with you. We’re just protecting you p>
Protecting. The word they used for the thing they did, which was closer to hoarding.
Patricia had survived this regime by being, essentially, un-eliminable. She didn’t back down. She didn’t take hints. When Callum made a disapproving face about weekend brunch plans, Patricia had looked him dead in the eye and said, “Callum, with all due respect, you can take your opinion and file it somewhere anatomically challenging,” and that had been the end of that particular conversation.
They’d arrived at the restaurant separately — a new French-Western fusion place on Ashfield Road that Patricia had been wanting to try and Lara had agreed to because it didn’t matter where they ate; what mattered was that they ate together, one last time, in a city that was about to become a memory.
Patricia was already seated, a glass of Sancerre in hand, her dark hair pulled back in the severe bun she wore when she meant business. She stood when she saw Lara, and the hug she gave was fierce and brief — Patricia’s hugs were like her legal arguments: compact, forceful, and over before you had time to formulate a response.
“I can’t believe you’re leaving.” She held Lara at arm’s length, examining her face with the clinical attention of someone looking for cracks. “Thornfield. Marriage.
A man you’ve never met. This is insane, Lala. You know that, right? This is certifiably, medically, legally insane p>
Lara sat down and took a sip of Patricia’s wine. “It’s not insane. It’s an arrangement. People have been doing it for centuries p>
“People have also been dying of plague for centuries. That doesn’t make it aspirational.” Patricia flagged down a waiter. “Another glass.
Actually, bring the bottle p>
She leaned forward, elbows on the table, chin on her interlaced fingers. “I always thought you’d marry one of them.
Callum or Declan. Stay in Halcombe. We’d get old together and complain about our husbands and drink too much rosé on Sundays p>
Lara smiled — the kind of smile that acknowledges a future that will never happen. “They have other options.
And so do I p>
Patricia’s face darkened. She knew about Bridget. Lara hadn’t told her the details — hadn’t needed to. Patricia had the instincts of a litigator and the information network of a spy, and she’d pieced together the story from fragments and silences and the particular quality of exhaustion in Lara’s voice over the past month.
“That Bridget,” Patricia began, her voice dropping into the register she reserved for opposing counsel and people who cut in line at airports. “After everything you did for her p>
“Leave it.” Lara shook her head. “Let’s not waste our last lunch on irrelevant people. Once I’m married, I’ll never see her again. What she does has nothing to do with me p>
She said this with conviction. She meant it. She was also, at that exact moment, wrong — because the door of the restaurant had just opened, and the universe, which had a taste for dramatic irony that bordered on the sadistic, had decided that Bridget Nolan should walk in.