Chapter 70
Chapter 70: (END)
Callum was busy.
Declan was recovering. The phone calls that had once been daily became weekly, then biweekly, then monthly, then — not never, but close to never: the occasional text, the birthday acknowledgment, the Christmas message that took three days to compose and said nothing.
They had been held together by Lara. She had been the bridge between them — the shared love, the shared project, the shared reason to stand in the same room.
Without her, they discovered what had been true all along: they were not, strictly speaking, friends. They were co-devotees. They had worshipped at the same altar for twenty years, and without the altar, the church was just a building, and the building was empty, and neither of them had a reason to enter it anymore.
Callum sat in his office at midnight and looked at the Blackwell building through the window and felt nothing.
Declan sat in a car in his garage and gripped the steering wheel and waited for the shaking to stop, and it didn’t stop, and he got out and went inside and sat on the sofa and turned on the television and watched something he wouldn’t remember.
In Thornfield, six hundred miles east, Lara Blackwell lived.
She lived the way people live when they’ve found the right place: quietly, fully, with the unremarkable contentment that is the opposite of drama and the evidence of happiness.
She worked — her design practice flourished in Thornfield, sustained by the Ashworth connections and the Blackwell name and, most importantly, by talent that had always been hers and was now, finally, displayed in a city that appreciated it.
She came home to Edmund. She fell asleep with her hand on his chest. She read with the lamp tilted fifteen degrees, and Edmund, who had learned this about her the way he’d learned everything about her — through attention, through presence, through the quiet, daily accumulation of intimacy — had installed a lamp that tilted exactly that far and no farther.
She didn’t think about Callum and Declan every day. Then she didn’t think about them every week. Then the thinking became seasonal — a memory triggered by a song, a smell, a date on the calendar that corresponded to a birthday or a holiday or a Wednesday-night dinner that no longer existed. The memories were not painful. They were not pleasant, either. They were historical — artifacts from a previous era, examined with the detached, slightly curious attention of someone visiting a museum wing devoted to their own past.
She had loved them. This was true. She knew it was true the way she knew the sky was blue and water was wet — not through analysis but through the accumulated evidence of twenty years of feeling.
Lᴀtɛst chᴀptɛrs in
But the love had been the wrong shape. Too passive. Too balanced. Too afraid of the damage that choosing would cause to ever become the thing it needed to become.
Edmund’s love was a different shape. It was active.
Deliberate. The love of a man who had chosen her — not inherited her, not grown up beside her, not drifted into devotion through proximity and habit, but chosen, with his eyes open and his options known and his decision made.
And Lara, who had spent twenty years being loved by default, discovered that being loved by choice was the thing she’d been waiting for all along.
Those three people who were once so close drifted apart in silence.
The silence was not empty. It was full — full of all the things that had been said and all the things that hadn’t, full of twenty years and twelve days, full of the particular, insoluble mystery of why some loves survive and others don’t, why some people find each other in time and others find each other too late, why the distance between almost and enough can be measured in decades and still never be crossed.
Callum worked.
Declan healed. Lara lived.
And the story — which had never really been about who Lara would choose, but about whether love built on habit could survive the arrival of love built on choice — ended the way most true stories end: not with a bang, not with a resolution, not with the satisfying, symmetrical closure of a problem solved, but with the slow, quiet, heartbreaking recognition that some things, once lost, are simply lost.
The End.