Chapter 43
Chapter 43:
She pulled Bridget up by the collar. Water streamed from Bridget’s hair, her face, her mouth. She coughed — deep, retching coughs, the kind that come from the diaphragm and leave the whole body shaking.
Gwendolyn dropped her on the garden path. Wiped her hands on her trousers with the brisk efficiency of a woman who had handled something distasteful and was now done with it.
“How does it feel?” Her voice was conversational.
Almost curious. “The desperation of suffocation? You can see the air. You can see other people breathing it.
But you can’t reach it. You’re right there, and it’s right there, and the distance between you and survival is three inches of water p>
She looked down at Bridget.
Dripping, coughing, crumpled on the stone path like a garment that had been wrung out and discarded.
“That’s what Lara felt. In her own home. Surrounded by flowers you put there p>
Gwendolyn turned to her son. To Callum. To Vivienne. The fury was still present — the fire hadn’t dimmed — but it had shifted focus. It was pointed now at the two young men who stood against the villa wall with the posture of boys being scolded rather than men being held accountable.
“And you two.” Her voice dropped. Not quieter — concentrated. The difference between a river spread across a floodplain and the same river forced through a gorge. “Who tries to make a woman jealous to force her hand? What kind of strategy is that? You’re not teenagers. You’re not children playing games in a schoolyard. You are grown men — allegedly intelligent, allegedly accomplished — and your best idea for resolving a romantic stalemate was to hire a human prop and parade her around until Lara snapped p>
She shook her head. The disappointment in the gesture was worse than the anger.
“No wonder she chose Edmund. No wonder she flew to Thornfield and married a stranger rather than spend another day watching you two perform devotion for a con artist while ignoring the woman who actually loved you p>
Vivienne, who had been standing with her arms crossed and the composed expression of a woman who agreed with every word but wouldn’t have delivered them quite so loudly, nodded.
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“Your mother’s right. What you’ve done is foolish.
And Lara is already married. The right thing — the decent thing — is to leave her alone p>
Callum’s eyes were lowered. Something was moving behind them — not acceptance, not surrender, but the complex, painful processing of a man being told the truth by the two women whose opinion he couldn’t dismiss.
Declan bit his lip. His posture was rigid — shoulders back, chin up, the stance of a man who refused to bow even when he knew he was wrong. He said nothing.
But his refusal to lower his head was, in its own way, an answer.
Vivienne and Gwendolyn looked at each other. They’d raised these boys. They knew the architecture of their stubbornness — knew it was structural, load-bearing, impossible to remove without bringing down the rest of the building. These were men who had built careers out of not giving up: Callum in boardrooms where the opposition was better funded, Declan on racetracks where the physics said stop and his foot said accelerate.
They would not give up on Lara. This was as certain as gravity.
The mothers sighed — simultaneously, the synchronization of two women who had been co-parenting by proxy for three decades — and collected their things.
“We’ve said what we can,” Vivienne murmured to Gwendolyn as they left. “The rest is between them and whatever’s left of their judgment p>
Gwendolyn snorted. “Their judgment. That’s a generous word for it p>