Chapter 48
Chapter 48:
Declan struck first.
He sent his team — twelve men, ex-military, the kind of security personnel who communicated in hand signals and wore earpieces and cost more per hour than most people earned in a day — to intercept Edmund’s envoys in Halcombe. The message was explicit: this is our city. The Blackwell name carries weight in Thornfield, but here, it carries nothing.
Edmund’s men withdrew. Not because they were outmatched — the Blackwell security apparatus was substantial — but because the calculus was simple: engaging in a territorial confrontation in Halcombe, six hundred miles from their base of operations, over a woman who had been safely married for a week, was not a fight worth having. They reported back to Edmund.
Edmund, who understood power dynamics the way surgeons understand anatomy, acknowledged the retreat and recalibrated.
Callum, meanwhile, sent his own people to Thornfield. Quietly. Strategically. Not as an invasion force — Callum was too intelligent for that — but as infrastructure.
An apartment.
A local contact.
A network of information that would ensure, when the time came to return to Thornfield, he wouldn’t be arriving blind and luggage-less and desperate. He would arrive prepared.
But that was the long game. The short game was Miriam.
Today was the fifth consecutive day that Callum and Declan had appeared at Miriam’s door.
The first day, she hadn’t let them in. The second day, she’d opened the door, looked at them, said “No,” and closed it again. The third day, she’d made them stand in the hallway for forty minutes before inviting them in for tea and then refusing to discuss Lara. The fourth day, she’d let them sit in the kitchen while she completed a crossword puzzle, answering their entreaties with monosyllables and the occasional pointed silence.
Today — the fifth day — they arrived with flowers (not wildflowers, never wildflowers again; these were orchids, purchased from a florist who had been instructed to verify that every bloom was hypoallergenic), a box of the specific brand of tea Miriam preferred, and the expressions of men who had rehearsed sincerity until it became indistinguishable from the real thing.
“Miriam.” Callum sat across from her at the kitchen table with the rigid posture of a man presenting to a board of directors, except the board was a sixty-four-year-old woman in reading glasses who was more formidable than any board he’d ever faced. “We know what we did. We understand it. We’ve accepted it p>
gⱯlnσν𝓮ℓs․cóm is your escape
He paused. Let the words land. Then, with the carefully calibrated vulnerability of a man who was not accustomed to asking for things he couldn’t buy:
“We’ve let Lala go. We’re not trying to stop the wedding. We’re not trying to win her back. We only want to attend the ceremony.
As — as brothers.
As the people who grew up with her. Nothing more p>
The word “brothers” cost him something. Lara could see it — or rather, Miriam could see it, because Miriam had spent thirty years reading the faces of these two boys and knew exactly how much each expression cost.
Callum saying “brothers” was Callum swallowing a bone: it went down, but not easily, and not without pain.
Declan leaned forward. He’d abandoned the racing driver’s swagger — the grin, the bravado, the I-can-handle-anything posture — and what remained was a man who looked, for the first time since Miriam had known him, genuinely young.
Genuinely lost.
“Miriam, please.
After twenty years with Lala — twenty years of birthdays and holidays and Wednesday-night dinners and that time she broke her arm and we carried her to hospital in our pajamas — we can’t miss her wedding. If we can’t be together, we’ve accepted that.
Even if she’d chosen the other one—” he gestured at Callum “—one of us would have been disappointed. That was always the deal.
But we never imagined she’d choose someone else entirely p>
He stopped. Swallowed.
“We just want to be there. In the room. Watching her be happy.
Even if it’s not with us p>
Miriam looked at them over her reading glasses. She looked the way she always looked when these two boys — men now, tall and accomplished and powerful, but still, in her kitchen, under her gaze, the same eight-year-olds who’d stolen biscuits from her counter — asked her for something she wasn’t sure she should give.
She knew what they’d done. She’d read the reports — Callum had sent them, in a gesture of transparency that was either genuine penitence or strategic manipulation, and with Callum, it was often both. She knew about Bridget.
About the plan.
About the flowers and the trophy and the deliberate campaign to provoke jealousy in a woman who had responded not with jealousy but with departure.
And she knew Lara. Knew her better than these two boys ever would, because Miriam had raised her — had been the mother-figure during the twenty years Dorothy and Harold were six hundred miles away. She knew that Lara’s heart was built for forgiveness the way a dam is built for water: it could hold an enormous amount, but once it broke, everything behind it came through at once.
She sighed. The sigh contained thirty years of watching these three children love each other badly.
“I can ask Lala,” Miriam said. “That’s all I can do. I can’t guarantee she’ll say yes p>
The relief on their faces was immediate and total — a physical transformation, the way faces change when a verdict comes back favorable, tension releasing from jaws and temples and the muscles around the eyes that had been holding everything in place.
“Thank you, Miriam. Just your word — that’s enough. That’s more than enough p>
They left. Quickly, before she could change her mind, with the urgent gratitude of men who had been given a lifeline and didn’t want to test its tensile strength.
Miriam stood alone in her kitchen. The orchids sat on the counter. The tea was untouched. Outside the window, Halcombe continued its indifferent business — traffic and sunlight and the lives of people who were not caught in the particular, exhausting orbit of Callum Hargrove and Declan Thorne.
She picked up her phone. Typed slowly, carefully, with the deliberate keystrokes of a woman who understood that this message would be read by someone she loved and would produce consequences she couldn’t predict.
“Lala, Callum and Declan say they want to attend your wedding. What do you think? Would you let them come p>
She read it twice.
Changed nothing. Pressed send.
Then she set the phone on the counter beside the orchids and waited for an answer that would be, whatever it was, the sound of something ending or something beginning, and she wasn’t sure which was worse.