Chapter 33
Chapter 33:
“Fine,” Declan had said. “A catalyst. Who p>
The answer arrived three weeks later, in the form of Bridget Nolan.
Lara herself had introduced her — a colleague from work, sweet-faced, soft-spoken, with a backstory of rural poverty and family abandonment that invited protection.
Callum and Declan had recognized the opportunity instantly.
A woman who needed rescuing.
A woman whose presence would make Lara confront the thing she’d been avoiding.
A woman who was, in the cold calculus of their plan, a prop.
They’d agreed on the rules.
Both would shower Bridget with attention — visibly, unmistakably, in Lara’s presence. The goal was not Bridget. The goal was Lara’s reaction. The goal was to make Lara feel what she’d been refusing to feel: possessiveness. Jealousy. The urgent, clarifying fear of losing something you’d assumed was permanent.
And then — the critical clause, the gentleman’s agreement they’d shaken on in the living room of a house that was about to be destroyed — whoever Lara chose, the other would accept. Would suppress everything. Would become a friend, truly and irrevocably, and would never speak of the alternative.
It was a clean plan.
A rational plan. The kind of plan that looks brilliant on a whiteboard and detonates on contact with reality.
Because they hadn’t accounted for Bridget.
Bridget, whose background — had either of them bothered to investigate, which they hadn’t, because the plan didn’t require Bridget to be real, only to be present — was not quite what she’d claimed. She was from a village, yes. Her parents had worked away from home, yes.
But they’d paid for her university. They’d funded her studies in painting and design. They’d given her enough that “difficult childhood” was, at best, a creative interpretation and, at worst, a deliberate fabrication.
After graduating, Bridget had borrowed a significant sum from her family, severed all contact, and reinvented herself in Halcombe with a new history and a talent for crying on cue. When she’d started working, she’d attached herself to Lara — the most successful, most connected, most generous person in her orbit — with the quiet determination of a vine finding a wall.
And they hadn’t accounted for themselves.
For the way Bridget’s performances — her tears, her helplessness, her practiced vulnerability — activated something primitive in them: the need to protect, to rescue, to be the hero. They’d started by pretending. They’d continued by habit.
And somewhere in the middle — somewhere between the birthday party and the pollen and the Midsummer Night — the pretending had become difficult to distinguish from the thing it was pretending to be.
They’d overplayed the hand. They’d let the prop become a character.
And the woman they were trying to provoke — the woman they loved, the woman whose jealousy was supposed to clarify everything — had looked at the performance and drawn a different conclusion entirely.
Not: I need to choose one of them before I lose both.
But: I’ve already lost both. Time to leave.
The helicopter banked over open countryside.
Below them, fields unrolled in patterns of green and gold.
Callum and Declan sat in their restraints and stared at the landscape and understood, with the specific clarity that only comes too late, that they had engineered their own disaster.
They’d wanted to force Lara’s hand. Instead, they’d forced her out the door.
Why had they done it? Why had they thought that the way to win a woman’s love was to perform its absence? Why had the two most accomplished men of their generation — one who ran a billion-dollar company, one who drove cars at the edge of physics — devised a plan to resolve a romantic impasse that a nineteen-year-old would have seen through in minutes?
There was no answer. Or rather, the answer was the same one that explained most human catastrophes: they’d been afraid.
Afraid of the conversation they couldn’t have.
Afraid of the choice they couldn’t make for her.
Afraid of the thing that would break if they pushed too hard — so they’d pushed sideways, through a stranger, through a scheme, through a coward’s geometry that pointed everywhere except at the truth.
And now Lara was married. To a man named Edmund Blackwell, with amber eyes and bodyguards and a marriage certificate with a seal that couldn’t be undone by strategy or regret or a midnight flight across six hundred miles of sky.
Callum looked at Declan.
Declan looked at Callum.
Between them, in the vibrating metal cabin of a helicopter they hadn’t asked to board, the reproach was mutual and total and wordless.
Why did we do this?
Neither had an answer that didn’t make it worse.