Chapter 59
Chapter 59:
Edmund noticed. He always noticed — this was his particular gift, the one that distinguished him from Callum (who noticed strategically) and Declan (who noticed emotionally p>
Edmund noticed the way a camera notices: without judgment, without agenda, simply recording what was there.
He waited. Let her arrive at the words on her own schedule.
“Edmund.” She released his sleeve. Looked at it — the wrinkled fabric, the evidence of her own anxiety — with mild embarrassment. “What can we do to end this? I don’t want to keep being bothered. I don’t want them appearing every time I leave the house, every time I look at my phone, every time I p>
She stopped. The sentence contained too much — too many examples, too many accumulated intrusions, too much evidence that Callum and Declan’s persistence, however motivated by love, had become a kind of siege.
“I’ve decided,” she said. More quietly now. “We can’t be friends. Not anymore. Maybe not ever. The only thing worth keeping is the memory of being children together — and even that…
Even that has been contaminated by what came after p>
She looked at Edmund with the expression of a woman who was asking for help and hated that she needed to ask.
Edmund put his arm around her.
Drew her against his shoulder. His hand found the curve where her neck met her back — the place where tension lived in Lara’s body — and pressed gently, the way you’d press a key on a piano, finding the exact amount of force that produced the note you wanted.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I have everything prepared.
After our wedding, they’ll never appear in our lives again p>
The wedding day arrived on a Saturday, and the Ashworth garden was transformed.
Pink — every shade of it, from the pale blush of dawn to the deep rose of sunset — covered every surface.
Arches, garlands, table settings, the chairs arranged in concentric semicircles facing the altar.
Flowers everywhere — cascading from trellises, winding around pillars, carpeting the aisle in petals that looked real enough to smell.
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They were not real.
Every flower — every rose, every peony, every trailing strand of wisteria — was handmade. Silk and wire and pigment, assembled by artisans who had been given a single instruction: make them indistinguishable from the living thing. The reason was simple and specific: Lara’s asthma. Lara’s allergies. The memory of a living room full of wildflowers and a woman on a floor fighting for air.
Edmund had been present for neither the flowers nor the attack, but he’d learned about both, and his response had been characteristic: not outrage, not vengeance, but engineering. The problem was pollen. The solution was the absence of pollen. The execution was flawless.
The guests arrived. Two hundred of them — the combined social architecture of the Ashworth and Blackwell families, dressed in the particular, understated luxury that Thornfield society preferred. They admired the flowers. They complimented the setting. They did not notice that nothing in the garden was alive.
Callum and Declan arrived. They’d infiltrated through a service entrance — the one gap in the Blackwell security that Callum had identified, the one door that was staffed by a catering employee whose mortgage was three months overdue. They wore suits. They carried the video on a drive in Callum’s pocket. They positioned themselves in the fourth row, close enough to the screen to reach it, close enough to the aisle to be seen.
They waited.
The ceremony was scheduled for three o’clock.
At three o’clock, the music began — a string quartet, playing something classical and appropriate — and the guests turned toward the aisle, and the officiant took his position, and everything was in place for the entrance of the bride and groom.
No one came.
Three-oh-five. Three-ten. The music continued. The guests murmured. The officiant checked his notes.
And Callum and Declan — seated in the fourth row with a video drive and a plan and the desperate, combustible hope of men who had driven six hundred miles to stop a wedding — began to believe that something had gone wrong.
Had Lara reconsidered? Had she fled? Had the weight of everything — the two men in the fourth row, the twenty years of history, the confession on the pavement — finally cracked the resolve she’d been maintaining?
For thirty seconds, Callum allowed himself to hope.
Then the holograms appeared.