Chapter 31
Chapter 31:
Lara looked at him.
At the amber eyes that held their worry so carefully.
At the hand that had snapped its fingers and summoned a private army with the casualness of a man hailing a taxi.
At the man who had, in the space of thirty minutes, introduced himself as her husband, dismantled two decades of romantic claim with a single sentence about Bridget, and ordered two men physically removed from a government building — all while maintaining the tone of someone discussing dinner reservations.
She smiled. Not a large smile — Lara’s smiles were measured things, rationed by a woman who had learned that generosity with emotion was often repaid with exploitation — but a real one.
“Scare me?” She shook her head. “It’s handled well this way p>
Something loosened in Edmund’s expression. The crack sealed. The amber eyes warmed.
They left the registry together — walked out the front entrance, into the Thornfield morning, into a city that Lara was learning to recognize as home.
Edmund opened the car door for her. She got in. He followed.
Behind them, on the roof, the helicopter’s rotors were already spinning.
Lara didn’t look up. She didn’t need to.
Callum and Declan were being returned to Halcombe — to the villa on the lake, to the house on Privet Lane that Callum had bought back from Stewart in a gesture of desperate sentimentality, to Bridget and her flowers and her tears and the life that had been waiting for them all along, the life they’d been building without realizing it, the life that simply didn’t include Lara anymore.
She leaned back in the car seat and let Thornfield scroll past the window.
In her mind, the math was simple. Without her presence — without her as the anchor, the audience, the object of devotion — Callum and Declan would do what they’d been doing for the past month: orbit Bridget. The centripetal force that had kept them turning around Lara for twenty years was gone, and Bridget was right there, waiting, willing, perfectly positioned to be the new center. It was physics. It was inevitable.
Besides, Bridget wanted them. Lara knew this the way you know the temperature of a room — not by measuring it, but by being in it.
ⱠⒶⵜẸŞ₸ ₡Ḥ₳₱₸ɆⱤŞ ⱻ
Every phone call, every performance, every calculated tear had been aimed at exactly this outcome: a life with two wealthy, devoted men who would protect her and adore her and never once look closely enough to see the machinery behind the curtain.
No, Lara thought.
Callum and Declan weren’t chasing her because they loved her. They were chasing her because they were uncomfortable. Twenty years of habit doesn’t dissolve overnight.
A photograph you’ve kept on your desk for two decades is hard to throw away, even after you’ve stopped looking at it. That’s all this was: the discomfort of rearrangement, the phantom ache of a limb that’s been amputated.
Give them time. Time would do what arguments couldn’t.
In the helicopter, rising above Thornfield’s sandstone skyline and banking west toward Halcombe, Callum and Declan sat in restrained silence and listened to the rotor blades beat the air like a mechanical heartbeat.
What had they come for?
What had they accomplished?
They’d arrived one morning too late. That was all. One morning. The difference between a marriage and a conversation, between a wife and a friend, between everything and nothing — measured in hours. They’d left Halcombe in the dark, driven like men possessed, flown through the dawn, arrived at the registry in time to see the one thing they couldn’t undo: Lara Ashworth becoming Lara Blackwell, holding a red booklet and a gold ring and the arm of a man who looked at her the way they should have been looking at her all along.
They had come to rescue her. They had found, instead, that she hadn’t needed rescuing. She had needed leaving.