Chapter 35
Chapter 35:
“What did you say p>
His voice was quiet. Quiet was worse than loud — Bridget knew this the way a small animal knows the difference between a dog barking and a dog going silent.
“We didn’t tell you we went to Thornfield,” Callum continued.
Each word was placed with the precision of a surgeon’s instrument. “How did you know p>
The question hung in the room like smoke.
Bridget’s eyes widened — a fraction too much, a fraction too fast, the overcorrection of a woman who had been caught off-balance and was scrambling to find it.
“What else do you know?” Callum asked.
Declan, who had been staring at the wall with the vacant intensity of a man trying to reassemble a shattered engine in his mind, turned. His gaze locked onto Bridget, and whatever remnant of tenderness had survived the past thirty-six hours — whatever last, lingering echo of the protective instinct she’d exploited for a month — died in his eyes as visibly as a candle being snuffed.
He reached out and took Bridget’s hand. Not gently. With the grip of a man who had spent his career managing three thousand pounds of torque and was now applying that calibration to a human wrist.
“What have you done?” His voice was low, controlled, vibrating. “Speak.
Don’t make us investigate it ourselves p>
“Did you say something to Lala? Did you do something that made her leave p>
Bridget’s face performed the full sequence: surprise, confusion, hurt, fear. The tears arrived — on schedule, on cue, sliding down her cheeks with the predictable regularity of a system executing a subroutine. She shrank. Her shoulders curled inward. Her free hand fluttered at her chest.
“I didn’t do anything—” The words came out in fragments, broken by sobs that may or may not have been real. “It was Lala’s parents — she told me she was going to visit them in Thornfield. She’s not in Halcombe anymore, so I just assumed that’s where she’d be. What’s wrong? Isn’t she there p>
She looked from Callum to Declan with the wide, liquid eyes that had dissolved their resistance a hundred times before — the eyes that said: I’m small, I’m helpless, I need you, please believe me because the alternative is that everything I’ve told you has been a lie.
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Declan’s grip didn’t loosen.
Callum’s expression didn’t change.
Something had shifted. Not dramatically — not with a visible crack or a audible snap — but fundamentally, the way a foundation shifts before a building falls. The mechanism that had made Bridget’s tears effective — the instinct to protect, the desire to be needed, the willingness to suspend scrutiny in exchange for the pleasure of being someone’s hero — had broken.
They’d deceived themselves into believing her. That was the truth of it, the ugly, load-bearing truth that had been holding up the entire structure of the past month. They’d known — not consciously, not in the articulated way that counts as knowledge — that Bridget’s performances were performances. That her helplessness was a tool. That her tears were a language, not an emotion.
But they’d chosen to believe because believing served the plan: if Bridget was genuine, then their treatment of her was kindness, not strategy, and the jealousy they were trying to provoke in Lara was a natural byproduct, not a manufactured one.
Now the plan was ashes. Lara was married.
And Bridget’s tears, landing on the coffee table between two untouched cups of hot water, produced in both men not sympathy but its opposite: the cold, clarifying recognition of a pattern that had been obvious all along and that they had chosen, deliberately, catastrophically, not to see.