Chapter 37
Chapter 37:
Inside Bridget’s mind, the calculation was still running.
If she could survive this moment — ride out the anger, weather the interrogation, keep her secrets sealed behind the wall of tears and denials that had served her for months — then time would do the rest. They were men. Men forgot. Men forgave, especially when the alternative was admitting they’d been fools. She just needed to hold the line. To keep her mouth shut. To wait.
Lara had only been in their lives twenty years before Bridget arrived — so what? Twenty years was a head start, not an insurmountable lead.
Given the same family, the same opportunities, the same face that cameras loved and men competed for, Bridget would have done everything Lara did and more. She was certain of this. The certainty was the engine that had powered every manipulation, every tear, every calculated performance of the past two months: the unshakeable belief that she deserved what Lara had and was simply correcting an unfairness the universe had overlooked.
But the calculation had a flaw. The flaw was that Declan Thorne, who had spent his career testing the precise moment when machines break, had stopped calculating and started acting.
His smile was the warning. It was cold — not cool, not composed, cold — the kind of smile that has nothing to do with amusement and everything to do with the absence of restraint. The smile of a man who has run out of patience and has discovered, beneath the patience, something he’s not proud of.
“You really think,” Declan said, and his voice was almost gentle, which was the most terrifying thing about it, “that I won’t make this very unpleasant for you p>
He leaned forward. The distance between his face and Bridget’s closed to inches.
“People who know me — people who’ve worked with me, raced against me, seen me on a bad day — know that my temper isn’t what you think it is p>
He moved.
Fast — racer-fast, the kind of speed that closes gaps before the other person’s nervous system has time to send the signal to flinch. His hand found the back of Bridget’s neck, and he pushed her forward, pressing her forehead against the coffee table with the controlled force of a man who knew exactly how much pressure to apply to make a point without crossing a line.
The table was cold against Bridget’s skin. Her cheek was pressed into the lacquered wood. She could see, at eye level, the two untouched cups of hot water she’d prepared — the domestic offering that had meant nothing, that had changed nothing, that sat on the table like props from a play that had been cancelled.
Ł Ŧ ¢ħ∆₽ŧ€Ř$ įŋ g𝒶l𝑛ovєl𝑠𝒸o𝓂
Callum’s voice arrived from behind her.
Calm. Unhurried. The voice of a man making a phone call about a quarterly report rather than dismantling someone’s life.
“Bridget, you’ve lost your job.
As of — ” a glance at his watch ” — four minutes ago. I’ve also contacted your family. Your real family. In the village. They’ll be here in a few days to collect you p>
The sound Bridget made was not a sob. It was something lower, more guttural — the sound of a person hearing a door lock behind them.
“No—” The word came out compressed, forced through lungs that couldn’t fully expand with her face pressed to a table. “Don’t let them come. Please. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything p>
Callum raised a finger.
Declan released his grip.
Bridget sat up, coughing, a red mark blooming across her forehead like a brand.
“Talk p>
Bridget coughed. Wheezed. Pressed her hand to her throat.
And then — with the split-second strategic clarity of a woman who had been cornered before and knew that the quality of a surrender mattered as much as the surrender itself — she reached into her pocket and produced her phone.
“I can show you.” She unlocked it with trembling fingers. “Look — my messages, my calls, everything. I haven’t done anything. It’s all a misunderstanding p>
She held the phone out the way a suspect holds out empty hands: see? Nothing. I’m clean.
Inside her chest, relief was spreading like warm water. The messages were gone. She’d deleted them — every provocation, every taunt, every poisonous text she’d sent to Lara — in the dark of her bedroom, hours ago, with the methodical thoroughness of a woman who understood that evidence was the only thing that could convict her. Without the messages, there was nothing. Suspicion without proof was just noise.
Callum didn’t take the phone. He looked at it — a single, evaluative glance, the way he looked at balance sheets that didn’t add up — and then he looked at Bridget, and the expression on his face said: I’ve seen better performances.
Declan took the phone. He turned it over in his hand, swiped through the message history — clean, scrubbed, suspiciously empty — and then, without looking at Bridget, pulled out his own phone and dialed a number.
“Nigel. I need a full data recovery on a device.
Everything deleted in the last seventy-two hours. Messages, photos, call logs — all of it. I’m sending it to the lab now p>
The words entered Bridget’s body through her ears and detonated somewhere behind her sternum.
Data recovery. The two words that turned her careful destruction into a temporary inconvenience. The two words that meant every message she’d deleted — every “I’m sorry, Lala, I didn’t think a few words from me would make them set you aside again,” every screenshot she’d taken of Lara’s blocked number as a trophy, every calculated cruelty she’d typed and sent and then erased — was about to be resurrected from the digital grave she’d buried it in.
“Don’t—” She lunged for Declan’s hand, for the phone, for anything. “Don’t send it to recover — please — I’ll explain, I can explain p>
Declan held the phone above his head, out of reach, with the dispassionate ease of an adult keeping a toy from a child.
“You had your chance to explain,” he said. “You chose to lie p>
Callum, still seated, still composed, still tapping the armrest with that slow metronome rhythm, picked up his own phone and called Nigel.
“Full investigation.
Every interaction between Bridget Nolan and Lara Ashworth over the past three months.
Digital, physical, testimonial. I want it on my desk by morning p>
He hung up. Set the phone down. Looked at Bridget the way he looked at failed investments: with the cold acknowledgement that the loss was real and the lesson was expensive.
Bridget sank to her knees on the floor of Heron Lake Manor and understood, with a clarity that felt like falling, that the game was over.