Chapter 23
Chapter 23:
The evidence glowed on Callum’s cracked phone screen, face-up on the floor where it had fallen: Flight 4471. Halcombe to Thornfield.
Departed 14:17. Passenger: Ashworth, L.
For a long time — long enough for the light to shift, for the shadows in the empty room to rearrange themselves — neither man moved. They stood in the living room of a house that no longer belonged to anyone, staring at a phone on the floor as if the information might rearrange itself into something bearable if they waited long enough.
It didn’t.
Declan moved first. Not toward the phone, not toward the door — toward the wall, where he pressed both palms flat against the plaster and leaned his forehead between them, and the sound he made was not quite a word. More a vibration. The kind of noise a building makes before it collapses.
“She was on the phone,” he said. His voice was gravel. “This morning. When we walked in. She said — ‘Everything is ready. I’m about to leave. I’ll arrive tonight p>
He lifted his head. His eyes were red, but not with tears — with the particular inflammation of a man whose body was processing an emotion his brain hadn’t finished identifying.
“She wasn’t talking about the move. She was never talking about the move p>
The realization unfolded like a map of a country they’d failed to visit.
Each crease revealed a landmark they should have recognized: the resignation. The suitcases by the door. The burned photographs. The sold house. The countdown timer Lara had set on her phone that first night — the one they’d never seen, never asked about, never known existed.
Callum picked up his phone from the floor. The screen was spider-webbed with cracks, the display bleeding color through fractured glass, but the flight information was still visible — still legible, still real. He stared at it with the expression of a man reading a contract he’d signed without understanding the terms.
“She planned this,” he said quietly. “Not days. Weeks. Maybe from the beginning p>
Since Bridget. The thought arrived in both their minds simultaneously, unspoken, like a shared frequency they’d both tuned into at the same moment. Since Bridget arrived, Lara had been moving toward this exit — patiently, methodically, with the quiet determination of a woman dismantling a life the way a surgeon removes sutures: carefully, completely, with the intention of leaving no trace.
More content now at gⱯlησvℯ𝓁s․com
Bridget’s phone call cut through the silence like an alarm in an empty building.
“Declan! Callum! I’m at the restaurant — we said we’d celebrate tonight, remember? Where are you? The waiter keeps asking if I’m ready to order and it’s getting awkward p>
Her voice was bright.
Cheerful. Oblivious. The voice of a woman standing in a building that was on fire and commenting on the wallpaper.
Declan held the phone to his ear and said nothing for so long that Bridget’s voice shifted from cheerful to uncertain.
“Declan? Are you there p>
“We’re not coming to dinner.” His voice was a closed door. “We’ll talk later p>
He hung up. Without Lara, what was a celebration? Without Lara, the restaurant was just a room with tables. Without Lara, the new house at Heron Lake was just a building they’d bought for someone who wasn’t in it. Without Lara, they were just two men in an empty house, discovering that the person who had given their rivalry its purpose, their devotion its object, their daily routines their shape, had quietly removed herself from the equation — and the equation, without her, produced nothing.
Callum stared at the cracked phone on the floor. Then at the bare walls. Then at the place where Lara’s reading chair had been — there was a lighter rectangle on the hardwood where the rug had protected the wood from years of sunlight, a ghost-outline of a life that had been here and was gone.
The front door opened.
Stewart — cheerful, professional, catastrophically ill-timed Stewart — entered the house mid-sentence, gesturing expansively to a man in a gray overcoat who was clearly a prospective buyer.
“— and as you can see, the natural light is exceptional. Three exposures. Original hardwood throughout. The property has just come on the market, so you’re seeing it before p>
He noticed Callum and Declan. The sentence died.
“Mr. Hargrove. Mr. Thorne.” Stewart’s salesman’s smile faltered, then recalibrated. “I didn’t expect — the house is sold, isn’t it? The paperwork p>
“It’s not for sale p>
Callum’s voice cut through the room like a blade laid flat on a table. Not raised. Not aggressive. Just absolute.
“I’m buying it p>
Stewart blinked. The man in the gray overcoat blinked.
For a moment, the three of them stood in a triangle of mutual bewilderment — the real estate agent, the bewildered buyer, and the CEO who had just made a financial decision with the impulsive certainty of a man trying to hold onto something that was already gone.
“Mr. Hargrove, you’re — you’re not joking p>
“Do I look like I’m joking?” Callum’s face was a landscape of controlled devastation: jaw set, eyes flat, the particular stillness of a man exerting enormous force to keep himself from falling apart. “Draw up the contract. I’ll sign it now p>
Stewart, who had sold real estate long enough to know that you never questioned a motivated buyer, produced the paperwork with the speed of a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat. The man in the gray overcoat was ushered politely but firmly toward the door with murmured apologies about “changed circumstances p>
Callum signed without reading. His name appeared on the line in the same handwriting he used on billion-dollar acquisition documents — precise, unhesitating — and if his hand trembled on the final letter, Stewart had the professional decency not to mention it.
Declan didn’t object. He didn’t need to. They understood each other on this point the way they understood each other on everything that mattered: without words, without negotiation, with the shared certainty of two men who had just lost the same thing and were grasping at whatever remained.
The house was a container for memories. Lara was gone, but the memories were here — pressed into the walls, absorbed by the wood, lingering in the air like the scent of a person who had just left the room. If they couldn’t keep her, they would keep the place she’d been.
It was, they would both realize later, the first in a long series of substitutions that would never quite work.