Chapter 32
Chapter 32:
The helicopter flew west, and in the engine-drone silence of two men with bound hands and demolished certainties, the past began to unspool — not in order, not neatly, but in the chaotic, overlapping way that memory works when the present has become unbearable and the mind retreats to the place where it went wrong.
Callum and Declan both knew the place. They’d known it for years. They just hadn’t wanted to look at it.
It started — as most catastrophes do — with a good idea that no one examined closely enough.
The problem had always been the triangle. Not a love triangle in the dramatic, soap-opera sense — not two men at war over a woman — but something quieter, more tangled, more fundamentally unsolvable. Two men who loved the same woman.
A woman who loved them both — enough to be paralyzed, not enough to choose.
They’d known since they were seventeen.
Callum had known first — had recognized the thing growing in his chest the way he recognized market trends: early, analytically, with the immediate understanding that this particular asset was going to be contested.
Declan had known second — had understood his feelings the way he understood engines: viscerally, physically, through a sensation in his sternum that no amount of speed could dislodge.
And Lara — Lara had stood between them like a woman on a bridge, unable to step in either direction, because stepping toward one meant stepping away from the other, and she couldn’t bear the sound that stepping away would make.
They’d tried, once, to force the issue. Separately, years ago.
Callum had taken Lara to dinner at a restaurant where the tables were too small for friendship and too candlelit for ambiguity, and he’d said something — not a declaration, exactly, but an intention, phrased in the boardroom language that was the only language he had for vulnerable things: “I’d like to discuss a change in the terms of our relationship.” Lara had gone pink. Then white. Then she’d excused herself to the bathroom and hadn’t come back for twelve minutes.
Declan’s attempt had been louder, messier, more Declan.
After a race — adrenaline still in his blood, the smell of burnt rubber still on his skin — he’d pulled Lara into his arms and kissed her. Not on the mouth. On the forehead.
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A kiss that was half-declaration and half-question, deposited on her hairline with the desperate, clumsy tenderness of a man who had never learned to want things quietly. Lara had frozen in his arms. She’d looked up at him with eyes that contained everything and resolved nothing, and she’d said, “Declan, I — I don’t know p>
I don’t know. Three words that kept them orbiting for another five years.
Because Callum and Declan understood her dilemma. They understood it the way soldiers understand a minefield: each path had consequences, and every consequence was someone getting hurt. If Lara chose Callum, Declan would lose not just the woman he loved but the brother he’d grown up with — because that’s what they were, in every way that mattered, brothers who shared a surname with no one. If Lara chose Declan, Callum would lose the same.
And Lara, who had spent her childhood watching the people she loved get hurt and had built her entire adult personality around preventing it, could not — would not — be the one to detonate that mine.
So they’d made a pact.
It was Callum’s idea. Of course it was Callum’s idea — strategy was his language, and this was a strategy: elegant, rational, and completely, catastrophically wrong.
“We use a third party,” Callum had said, one evening at the Privet Lane house, after Lara had gone to bed. He was sitting in the armchair by the window, whiskey in hand, the lamplight making his face look older than thirty-one. “Someone who makes Lara jealous enough to finally choose. Not a threat — a catalyst. Someone who forces the issue without us having to force it ourselves p>
Declan, sprawled on the sofa, had stared at the ceiling. “That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard p>
“Do you have a better one p>
Silence. The kind of silence that means: no.
“We both know she loves us,” Callum continued. “Both of us.
Differently, but she does. The problem is that she can’t choose, and we can’t choose for her, and if we keep going like this — this stalemate, this endless, comfortable limbo — we’ll be sixty years old and still sleeping in separate houses on either side of a woman who calls us her best friends p>
The word “friends” hit Declan like a physical blow. He’d heard Lara use it. He’d heard the way she deployed it — carefully, like a sandbag against a rising flood — and he knew, with the gut-certainty of a man who reads situations through his body rather than his brain, that “friends” was not what they were.
But it was what they’d remain, if nothing changed.