Chapter 26
Chapter 26:
“Is that the truth p>
The question hung between them — a question Declan already knew the answer to, asked not for information but for the slender hope that Miriam would break and tell him what was really happening.
She didn’t.
“It’s the truth,” Miriam said, and her voice was steady, and the steadiness itself was the giveaway — the tell of a woman who was holding something together with both hands. “Go to sleep, Declan. Let Lala visit her family. She’ll be back p>
She hung up before he could respond.
Declan sat on the edge of his bed and turned the conversation over in his mind the way he turned engine parts — looking for the flaw, the crack, the stress point that would reveal where the failure was.
Lara had told Miriam they knew. Which meant Lara had lied to Miriam about them — had created a version of events in which Callum and Declan were informed, consenting, in the loop. Which meant whatever she was doing in Thornfield, she didn’t want Miriam to tip them off. Which meant this wasn’t a visit.
Visiting parents didn’t require burning twenty years of photographs. Visiting parents didn’t require selling your house. Visiting parents didn’t require blocking the phone numbers of the two people who’d been the center of your life since childhood.
Something was happening in Thornfield. Something larger than a family visit. Something Lara had planned in secret, executed in silence, and hidden behind a wall of misdirection that was beginning, in the pre-dawn dark of a villa on a lake, to look less like avoidance and more like escape.
Declan stood.
Grabbed his jacket. Walked into the hallway.
Callum was already there.
He was leaning against the wall outside his bedroom door, fully dressed, car keys in hand, a cigarette — unlit, just held, a prop for restless fingers — between two fingers. He looked like a man who had been waiting, not for Declan specifically, but for the moment when waiting became unbearable and action became the only alternative to losing his mind.
“I bought tickets,” Callum said. No preamble. No greeting. “Last flight to Thornfield. Leaves in ninety minutes p>
Read it first on.cøm
Declan didn’t ask how.
Callum had assistants, connections, the kind of resources that turned impossible logistics into solved problems. The how didn’t matter.
“Let’s go,” Declan said.
They left the villa without luggage. Without telling Bridget. Without looking at the lake or the garden or the four-bedroom, three-bathroom sanctuary that was supposed to be the beginning of something new. They walked to Declan’s car — the Aston Martin, because Declan always drove and Declan always drove fast — and Declan turned the engine over and the sound it made was the sound of two men who had finally, catastrophically, woken up.
The drive to the airport took seventeen minutes. It should have taken forty.
Declan drove the way he raced: with precision and disregard for consequences, threading through empty streets, running yellow lights, the speedometer climbing past numbers that would have made a traffic officer weep.
Neither man spoke.
At the airport, they moved through security with the focused urgency of people catching a flight they couldn’t miss — because missing it meant another day, and another day meant whatever was happening in Thornfield would be one day more advanced, one day more complete, one day closer to a point from which it couldn’t be reversed.
The plane lifted off as the first gray light leaked into the eastern sky.
Callum sat in 3A, window seat, watching Halcombe shrink beneath him — the grid of streets, the glint of the lake, the dark patch where Privet Lane was — and felt, for the first time in his adult life, that he was chasing something he might not catch.
Declan sat in 3B, aisle seat, his knee bouncing with the trapped energy of a man who was built for speed and was currently trapped in a metal tube moving at the pace determined by someone else.
Between them, in the empty middle seat, was the space where Lara should have been.
The plane flew east, toward Thornfield, toward a city they didn’t know and a truth they weren’t ready for, and the sky behind them turned from black to gray to gold to the impossible, heartbreaking blue of a morning that didn’t care what they’d lost.