Chapter 19
Chapter 19:
They answered in unison, as they did when they were certain: “Because you care p>
Because you care. Twenty years of shared history compressed into three words. Twenty years of knowing each other’s rhythms — the way Lara twisted her ring when she was nervous, the way Callum’s left eyebrow rose when he disagreed, the way Declan’s voice dropped half a register when he was afraid. They had always been able to read her. They had always known what she was feeling before she said it, sometimes before she felt it herself.
But now — now they were reading a book in a language they’d forgotten, and the translation they’d arrived at was: she’s jealous. She wants us back. She’s waiting to be convinced.
They were wrong.
And the distance between what they believed and what was true was the exact distance between Halcombe and Thornfield.
Lara looked at them. She looked at them the way you look at a painting you’ve loved for years and have just realized is a forgery — with a sadness that has nothing to do with the painting and everything to do with the years.
“I don’t care,” she said.
The words were flat.
Airless. The voice of a woman who had stopped performing.
“You said you only see Bridget as a friend. I’m also your friend. So why would I care p>
The logic was clean and devastating.
Friend. She’d used the word like a scalpel — precise, sterile, designed to cut.
For a moment, neither man spoke.
Then Callum — Callum, whose control was legendary, whose composure had survived hostile board meetings and market crashes and the death of his father — broke.
“Lala.” His voice was raw. Stripped. The voice of a man who had run out of strategy and was left with only the truth. “You know what I want isn’t just friendship p>
Declan, unable to stand being second in any declaration, stepped forward. “After twenty years, Lala — do you really think we’re just friends? After everything p>
Lara looked at them. Two men, standing in her doorway, finally saying the thing they’d been circling for a decade. Two declarations, overlapping, urgent, delivered with the desperation of people who sense that the window is closing and are throwing themselves at the glass.
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She knew what they meant. She had always known. They loved her — had loved her since they were children, had built their lives around her, had arranged their homes and their schedules and their ambitions to orbit hers.
And she had loved them back, in her way, in the complicated, divided, never-quite-enough way that was all she could manage when two people wanted the whole of something she could only offer in halves.
But love that lets you suffer isn’t love. It’s custody.
Lara nodded. Slowly. With the careful deliberation of a woman placing the last piece in a puzzle she’d been assembling for weeks.
“Yes,” she said. “Soon we’ll have another type of relationship p>
She watched the words land — watched hope flare in their eyes, brief and bright, the unmistakable spark of men who had heard what they wanted to hear.
Another type of relationship. Something more than friendship.
Finally.
They didn’t understand. They wouldn’t understand until she was gone.
And by then, the relationship would have already changed — from friends to nothing, from something to strangers, from the center of each other’s worlds to people who used to know each other in a city neither of them lived in anymore.
Lara held their gaze. Smiled. Said nothing more.
The silence did the rest.