Chapter 22
Chapter 22:
“I’m sorry,” he said to Bridget. “I need to check on her. Stay here. I’ll be back p>
“Callum! Declan p>
Bridget called after them — once, twice — but neither man turned around. Their cars started in quick succession, engines roaring to life with the urgency of machines responding to men who were, for the first time in a month, moving in the right direction.
They drove to Privet Lane.
The house was empty.
Not empty the way a house is empty when its occupants are out — not the temporary emptiness of shoes by the door and coats on hooks and a lingering smell of coffee.
Empty the way a house is empty when it’s been left. Truly left. The way a body is empty after the person inside it is gone.
Lara’s room was bare. The closet doors stood open, revealing naked hangers. The bathroom had been wiped clean — no toothbrush, no medication, no inhaler on the shelf where it had lived for twenty years. The skylight cast a rectangle of fading light on the floor, illuminating nothing.
She had taken everything.
They drove through Halcombe for an hour. Past the office she’d resigned from. Past the restaurant on Ashfield Road. Past Miriam’s building. The city offered no answers. The city didn’t know where she’d gone, or didn’t care, or both.
They returned to Privet Lane simultaneously — Callum from the east, Declan from the west — and stood in the empty living room and looked at each other with the shared, terrible understanding of men who have just realized that the thing they feared wasn’t a possibility but a fact.
Callum called Nigel.
Nigel answered on the first ring, because Nigel always answered on the first ring — it was the primary qualification for being Callum Hargrove’s assistant.
“Nigel. I need you to locate Lara Ashworth. Now.
Check flight records, train manifests, rental agencies — everything p>
There was a pause. The sound of typing. Then Nigel’s voice, careful and precise, delivering information the way a surgeon delivers a diagnosis.
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“Mr. Hargrove, Miss Ashworth boarded a flight to Thornfield today.
Flight 4471, departed at 2:17 PM.
Based on the schedule, she should have landed approximately forty minutes ago p>
The words entered the room and rearranged it.
Thornfield.
Lara had gone to Thornfield. Not to a meeting, not to a business trip, not to visit family for the weekend. She had packed every possession she owned, sold her share of their home, resigned from her job, and boarded a plane to the city she’d left at five years old — the city where her parents lived, where her family waited, where a marriage had been arranged that she’d never mentioned.
She had left them.
“That’s impossible.” Declan’s voice came out strangled, squeezed through a throat that had forgotten how to work. “She wouldn’t — she promised. She promised to stay in Halcombe with us. Nigel, are you sure p>
Callum’s face had gone very still. The CEO mask — the one he wore in boardrooms, the one that revealed nothing — was in place, but beneath it, something was collapsing.
A scaffolding that had been holding up a version of reality in which Lara was always there, always waiting, always his.
“Check again,” Callum said. His voice was a line drawn with a ruler — straight, controlled, betraying nothing except the fact that control was all he had left. “Confirm it p>
The silence on the line lasted long enough for hope to flicker and die.
“Mr. Hargrove.” Nigel’s voice was very quiet. “Mr. Thorne. There’s no error p>
He sent the flight confirmation to Callum’s phone. The screen lit up with the details — flight number, departure gate, seat assignment, boarding time — each piece of data a small, precise nail in the coffin of everything they’d assumed.
Callum looked at the screen. The letters blurred. He blinked, and they sharpened, and the sharpness was worse.
The phone slipped from his hand. Not dramatically — not thrown, not hurled — just slipped, the way things slip from fingers that have stopped gripping, and hit the floor with a crack that sounded, in the empty room, like something much larger breaking.
Neither man moved.
Outside, the last light left the sky over Halcombe, and the house on Privet Lane — the house where three lives had been joined and where one had just been quietly, irrevocably subtracted — settled into the darkness like a body lowering itself into cold water.