Chapter 22 Chapter 22: “I’m sorry,” he said to Bridget. “I need to check on her. Stay here. I’ll be back p> “Callum! Declan p> Bridget called after them — once, twice — but neither man turned around. Their cars started in quick succession, engines roaring to life with the
Chapter 21 Chapter 21: The plane lifted off at 2:17 PM, two minutes behind schedule, and Lara Ashworth felt her body leave the ground and didn’t think about the two men she was leaving behind. She thought about the window seat. About the way the clouds looked from above —
Chapter 20 Chapter 20: Callum’s heart was doing something it hadn’t done since he was seventeen and had nearly told Lara he loved her at a bus stop in the rain. It was beating too fast, and too loud, and in a rhythm that suggested his cardiovascular system knew something
Chapter 19 Chapter 19: They answered in unison, as they did when they were certain: “Because you care p> Because you care. Twenty years of shared history compressed into three words. Twenty years of knowing each other’s rhythms — the way Lara twisted her ring when she was nervous, the
Chapter 18 Chapter 18: Dorothy’s voice came through the phone like a hand extended across six hundred miles — steady, warm, belonging to a world Lara hadn’t lived in for twenty years but was about to return to. “Lala, what time is your flight? We’ll come pick you up p>
Chapter 17 Chapter 17: “With me here, you can go to any wedding you want p> Declan, not to be outdone, materialized on Bridget’s other side with the competitive urgency of a man who had been losing a race and had just spotted an opening. “And I’m here too. Not
Chapter 16 Chapter 16: Bridget arrived at the restaurant the way Bridget arrived everywhere: as if by accident, as if she’d simply been carried there by the current of her own innocence, as if she hadn’t checked Lara’s location on a shared social media map before choosing this particular establishment
Chapter 15 Chapter 15: The apartment was dark when she got home. She moved through it without turning on the lights — she knew the layout by touch now, every corner and threshold, the way you know a body you’ve lived in — and sat on the edge of her
Chapter 14 Chapter 14: Callum saw the tears first. Not the suitcase by the door, not the shopping bag from the department store, not the way Miriam was holding Lara’s hand with both of hers as if trying to memorize the shape of it. He saw the tears — Lara’s
Chapter 13 Chapter 13: The paperwork took four days. Stewart, whose professional enthusiasm had only been sharpened by the mild terror of working for three clients who clearly had unresolved personal issues, moved with admirable speed. Contracts were drafted. Signatures were collected — Lara’s with quiet finality, Callum’s with visible
Chapter 12 Chapter 12: “I’m the one selling,” Lara said, from the fourth step. She’d considered several ways to deliver this line — apologetic, defiant, breezy — and had settled on neutral. The tone of a woman reporting a fact. The sky is blue. The market is up. I’m liquidating
Chapter 11 Chapter 11: She watched them carry the flowers out of the house. Callum took the vases; Declan swept the petals from the floor. They moved quickly, efficiently, two men performing penance through housework. Within fifteen minutes, every trace of pollen was gone — wiped, vacuumed, the windows thrown
Chapter 10 Chapter 10: There were a hundred things Lara wanted to say. They crowded the back of her throat like passengers at a departure gate — furious, jostling, each one convinced it should board first. She wanted to say: I was five feet away from you and you didn’t
Chapter 9 Chapter 9: For a moment — one crystalline, weightless moment — the flowers were beautiful. Golden pollen drifted through the morning light like dust in a cathedral. The roses were fat and crimson. The lilies leaned out of their vases with the careless elegance of women who know
Chapter 8 Chapter 8: The silence after they left was the loudest thing in the house. Lara stood in the hallway for what might have been thirty seconds or five minutes — time had gone slippery, the way it does after something breaks — and Declan’s words circled in her
Chapter 7 Chapter 7: Bridget Nolan stood on Lara’s doorstep holding the Beaumont Award the way a hostage negotiator holds a phone — with leverage, not generosity. The trophy was beautiful. Hand-blown crystal, shaped like a rising wave, with Lara’s name etched into the base in a typeface that probably
Chapter 6 Chapter 6: Something was wrong with Lara, and neither of them could name it. It wasn’t any single thing — not the photos, not the resignation, not the suitcases arranged with the precision of a woman who’d already made a decision. It was the aggregate. The sum of
Chapter 5 Chapter 5: The trick with burning photographs, Lara discovered, was that they didn’t want to go quietly. She’d expected something cinematic — a single match, a clean flame, ashes floating upward like released birds. What she got was stubborn photo paper that curled and blackened at the edges
Chapter 4 Chapter 4: Lara’s phone lit up at eleven forty-seven, which she knew because she’d been staring at the countdown timer — thirteen days, twenty-one hours, thirteen minutes — when the notification slid across it like an uninvited guest. Bridget Nolan. She should have ignored it. Any therapist, any
Chapter 3 Chapter 3: She’d stayed for them. That was the truth of it, stripped of everything decorative. Not for Halcombe’s eucalyptus air or Miriam’s sensible advice or the design career she’d built here. She’d stayed because two men had looked at her with a desperation that felt like devotion,