Chapter 58
Chapter 58:
They divided the work the way they’d divided everything for thirty years: Callum took strategy, Declan took action.
Declan drove back to Halcombe to see Gwendolyn and Vivienne. The mission was specific: retrieve the photographs. Whatever photographs remained — whatever evidence of twenty years of shared life had survived Lara’s methodical purge before she’d left. The burned frames, the emptied albums, the walls stripped of their images — these were the wounds Lara had inflicted on her own history, and the wounds were thorough.
But not total. Nothing is ever total.
Gwendolyn met him at the door of the Thorne house with the expression of a woman who had been expecting this visit and dreading it in equal measure.
“The albums are in the study,” she said. “Most of what’s left is from before you were ten p>
They sat together — mother and son, on the floor of a study that smelled like old leather and furniture polish — and went through the remnants.
A photograph of Callum, Declan, and Lara at a birthday party, age seven: three children in pointed hats, Lara between them, each boy holding one of her hands.
A school picture — all three in uniform, Lara with a missing front tooth, Callum already wearing the serious expression he’d never lose, Declan mid-laugh.
A holiday snapshot: a beach, three sets of footprints in the sand, the ocean in the background, the light the particular golden-hour light of a day that no one had realized, at the time, they’d eventually need proof of.
The photographs were few.
A dozen, maybe fifteen. Out of twenty years of shared life — twenty years of dinners and holidays and Wednesday nights and hospital runs and midnight phone calls and the thousand invisible moments that constitute a friendship — fifteen photographs had survived. The rest were ash. Lara had been thorough because Lara was thorough about everything, and when she’d decided to leave her life behind, she’d done it with the same meticulous attention she brought to her design work: comprehensively, systematically, leaving as little evidence as possible.
Declan held a photograph of the three of them at sixteen — a selfie, taken at arm’s length, blurry, badly framed, perfect. Lara was laughing.
Callum was trying not to.
Declan was making a face at the camera, the face of a boy who didn’t yet know that the girl beside him would someday marry someone else.
“This is enough,” Declan said. His voice was rough. “This is something p>
Meanwhile, in Thornfield, Callum was operating.
Three days until the wedding. Three days to infiltrate the Blackwell security apparatus — to find a gap, a weakness, a bribable employee, an unguarded entrance. Three days to position themselves inside the ceremony so that when the moment came — the moment the officiant asked whether anyone objected — they would be there. Visible. Undeniable. Two men standing in the middle of a wedding and refusing to let it proceed without acknowledgment that the bride had a past, and the past had a claim, and the claim was not yet settled.
Callum didn’t sleep. He worked the way he’d worked during the hostile takeover of Meridian Capital — eighteen-hour days, powered by coffee and the particular, corrosive energy of a man who was losing and knew it and was not willing to know it. He mapped the Blackwell estate. He catalogued entry points. He identified staff members whose financial situations suggested susceptibility to inducement. He assembled a dossier on the wedding logistics — venue, timing, guest list, security rotations — with the obsessive thoroughness of a man planning a military operation rather than a wedding disruption.
He also prepared a video. This was his contingency — a compilation of twenty years, set to music, designed to play on the ceremony’s main screen at the moment of maximum impact. The photographs Declan had retrieved. Video clips from old phones.
Audio recordings of Lara laughing, Lara singing in the car, Lara’s voice saying their names with the particular warmth she reserved for the two people she’d known longest. Twenty years compressed into four minutes and thirty seconds, designed to remind every person in that room — including Lara — that Edmund Blackwell’s twelve days could not erase what Callum and Declan’s twenty years had built.
It was, like all of Callum’s plans, elegant. Strategic.
And doomed.
In the Ashworth house, three miles away, Lara was sitting on the edge of the bed she now shared with Edmund and unconsciously wrinkling the cuff of his sleeve between her fingers.
She didn’t notice she was doing it. The gesture was autonomic — the physical expression of an anxiety she hadn’t articulated, the body’s way of processing worry that the mind hadn’t yet converted into words. She was pulling the fabric between her thumb and forefinger, creasing and releasing, creasing and releasing, with the repetitive, soothing rhythm of a person counting something that couldn’t be counted.