Chapter 44
Chapter 44:
After the mothers left, the villa returned to its particular brand of expensive silence — the kind of silence that costs money to maintain, all double-glazed windows and insulated walls and a garden fountain that kept burbling as though nothing had happened beside it.
Callum looked at Declan.
Declan looked at Callum. No words were exchanged, but the decision was already made — had been made, probably, on the helicopter, or in the empty house on Privet Lane, or perhaps even earlier, in the moment Nigel’s voice had come through the phone and confirmed that Lara was gone. The mothers’ words — reasonable, accurate, delivered with the particular authority of women who had earned the right to be listened to — had landed and been acknowledged and filed in the part of both men’s brains labeled “things we know are true and will disregard p>
They were not going to leave Lara alone.
But first: Bridget.
Callum picked up his phone. “Nigel. Have Miss Nolan and her belongings removed from the property.
All of it. To the street p>
The instruction was delivered with the same inflection he used when closing underperforming divisions: clean, unsentimental, logistically precise. There was no pleasure in it. No vindictiveness. Just the cold administrative finality of a man clearing an item from a ledger.
Bridget was still in the garden, still wet, still coughing, when two workers arrived and guided her — not roughly, but with the unmistakable firmness of men who had been given clear instructions — through the villa’s front door, down the driveway, and onto the public sidewalk.
Her luggage followed. The single rolling case. The garbage bags of clothes. The toiletries, tossed into a cardboard box that someone had found in the garage.
Each item placed on the pavement beside her with the bureaucratic indifference of an eviction proceeding — which, functionally, this was.
The villa’s gates closed behind her. The electronic lock engaged with a sound that was small and definitive: click.
Bridget Nolan stood on the sidewalk outside Heron Lake Manor in wet clothes, with damp hair, a swelling cheek, red marks on her wrist, and the accumulated possessions of a life that had been, for sixty-three days, something it was never going to remain.
The two months in the villa — the warm lighting, the lake view, the bathroom with heated floors, the closet she’d been filling with clothes purchased on credit she didn’t have — had the quality, now, of a dream described by someone else. Vivid but inaccessible.
Every story starts at gⱯlnσν𝓮𝓁s﹒𝒸оm
Beautiful but untouchable.
A story about a person she’d been pretending to be, told in a house she’d been pretending to own, surrounded by people she’d been pretending to love.
She was still the girl from the village. The distance between that girl and the woman who’d slept in a lakeside villa had been measured not in miles but in lies, and the lies had just been collected.
A police officer approached. He was young, polite, and clearly uncomfortable with the image before him: a woman sitting on a curb surrounded by garbage bags, looking like a person for whom things had recently and dramatically gone wrong.
“Ma’am, you can’t stay here. This is a residential area. No loitering p>
The words were procedural, routine, delivered with the mechanical sympathy of someone who said them several times a week.
But to Bridget — who had spent two months being called “dear” and “sweetheart” by women in designer clothes and being fought over by men whose faces appeared in magazines — the word “ma’am,” spoken by a beat cop on a public sidewalk, was a demotion that felt like a death.
She stared at the officer.
At the bags.
At the villa’s closed gates behind her.
Then she picked up her phone. Not to call Callum. Not to call Declan. In the wreckage of her strategy, one last reflex fired — the instinct that had carried her through every previous crisis, the instinct that said: when you have nothing, find someone who has something and make them give it to you.
But the phone rang before she could dial.
The number was unfamiliar. The voice was not.
“You damn girl.” Roy Nolan’s voice came through the speaker with the particular aggression of a man who had been drinking and was calling to collect a debt. His accent was thick — the village dialect that Bridget had spent years scrubbing from her own speech, syllable by syllable, until her voice sounded like it belonged to the city she’d adopted and not the place she’d abandoned. “I finally tracked you down. Who gave you the nerve to steal the family’s savings? I hear you’ve been making good money. Time to pay it back p>
The threat was implicit. Roy Nolan was not a man who made threats explicitly — he simply described what he was going to do, and the description was the threat.
Bridget hung up. Her hands were shaking — not the practiced, photogenic tremor she’d deployed for months, but the real kind, the kind that comes from the autonomic nervous system registering danger.
“How can it be so fast p>
Callum’s people. It had to be.
Callum had contacted her family — her real family, the family she’d erased from her biography, the family whose existence she’d denied and whose money she’d taken and whose village she’d left without looking back — and now they were coming. Not to reconcile. Not to forgive. To collect.
She grabbed the handle of her rolling suitcase. Stood up. Took two steps. Then stopped.
Her apartment. The apartment she’d rented in Halcombe — the small, adequate, perfectly functional studio in Elmwood Terrace that had been her address before the villa and would need to be her address again — was she still paying rent on it? Had she cancelled the lease? She couldn’t remember. The past two months had been so consumed by the performance of a different life that the logistics of her actual one had gone unattended.
She had nowhere to go. The realization arrived not as a crash but as a slow drain — the feeling of standing in a bathtub as the water empties, watching the level drop, knowing that soon there would be nothing left and you’d be standing on cold porcelain with your feet bare.
The police officer cleared his throat. “Ma’am. I’m going to have to ask you to move p>
Bridget looked at him.
At the badge.
At the street.
At the sky above Halcombe, which was blue and indifferent and didn’t care that she’d lost everything.
“Fine,” she said. “I’m going p>
She called a moving company.
Gave them the address. Watched the truck arrive and the workers load her bags — the garbage bags and the rolling case and the cardboard box of toiletries — into the back with the impersonal efficiency of men handling cargo.
She climbed into the passenger seat, pulled the door shut, and stared at the dashboard while Heron Lake Manor shrank in the side mirror and then disappeared behind a curve, replaced by the ordinary streets of a city that had been the backdrop to the best and worst two months of her life and was now, simply, the place where she had nowhere to sleep.