Chapter 21
Chapter 21:
The plane lifted off at 2:17 PM, two minutes behind schedule, and Lara Ashworth felt her body leave the ground and didn’t think about the two men she was leaving behind.
She thought about the window seat.
About the way the clouds looked from above — not the romantic, cotton-ball version from paintings, but the real kind: dense, gray-white, endless, like a second earth made of nothing. She thought about the complimentary pretzels, which were stale. She thought about the woman in 14C who was reading a romance novel with a cover that featured a shirtless man on a horse, which seemed impractical for both the man and the horse.
She did not think about Callum. She did not think about Declan.
This was a choice, and it required effort, and the effort was worth it.
Somewhere below her — six hundred miles behind and getting farther — the city of Halcombe continued without her. Traffic moved.
Coffee was poured. The jasmine on Privet Lane bloomed for no one in particular.
And at Heron Lake Manor, in the expensive, sun-drenched villa that was supposed to be the beginning of a new chapter for four people, the atmosphere was doing something unusual.
It was curdling.
Three hours. That was how long Callum and Declan had been at the manor with Bridget, waiting for Lara to arrive. Three hours of arranging furniture and hanging curtains and carrying boxes into rooms that echoed with the particular emptiness of spaces that haven’t been lived in yet. Three hours during which neither man had said much, and Bridget had said even less, and the silence had thickened like smoke in a room with no windows.
The villa was large.
Four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a kitchen that opened onto a garden with a view of the lake. It was the kind of property that appeared in lifestyle magazines beside words like “sanctuary” and “retreat” — words that meant nothing when the person you’d bought it for wasn’t there.
The luggage in the foyer told the story. Three sets.
Callum’s — two suitcases, black, precisely packed.
Declan’s — three bags, overstuffed, one of them unzipped.
Bridget’s — a single rolling case and a tote bag.
Every chapter lives on; comm
No fourth set. No sign that Lara had ever intended to be here.
Callum stood at the living room window, looking out at the lake without seeing it. His phone lay on the windowsill, screen up, displaying a list of outgoing calls — all to Lara, all unanswered. Seven calls. The last one had rung nine times before going to voicemail. He hadn’t left a message. He didn’t know what he’d say.
Declan was on the sofa, his posture uncharacteristically still. He sat with his forearms on his knees and his phone in his hands, thumbing through the same list of missed calls, the same wall of silence. The racing driver who never sat still was sitting very still, and the stillness itself was a kind of alarm.
Bridget, perched on the arm of a chair in the corner, watched both men with the alert caution of someone who had just realized the room was not performing the way she’d rehearsed it.
She tried.
“Maybe Lara hasn’t finished packing yet,” she offered, her voice bright and careful, the tone of a woman placing a bandage on a wound she couldn’t see. “Why don’t we start organizing? You said we’d have dinner together tonight. I’m sure she’s just running late p>
Callum nodded. The nod was mechanical — his body agreeing to something his mind had already moved past.
The minutes accumulated. The lake outside turned from blue to gold to the deep, bruised purple of early evening. Neither man moved to organize anything. Neither man moved at all.
It was Declan who broke first. He always broke first — it was his nature, the same impulse that made him floor the accelerator when other drivers braked, the inability to sit with uncertainty when action was available.
He stood.
Grabbed his jacket — not put it on, grabbed it, balling the leather in one fist like a weapon he wasn’t sure how to use.
“Something happened to Lara,” he said. “I’m going p>
He was out the door before the sentence finished echoing.
Callum lasted eleven seconds longer. He turned from the window, looked at Bridget, and the expression on his face — the one he was trying to suppress, the one that was leaking through anyway — was not concern for a friend. It was not the measured worry of a man dealing with a logistical problem. It was panic. Raw, unmistakable, the kind of panic that only comes from realizing you’ve lost something you assumed was permanent.