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 see me.
She wanted to say: I was dying, actually dying, and you were saving flowers.
She wanted to say: You pushed me, Declan. You put your hands on me and pushed me into a table while I couldn’t breathe, and you didn’t notice, and that is the thing I will remember long after I’ve forgotten the rest of this.
But what came out was a sob. Just one — small, involuntary, the kind that escapes before you can press your lips together — and then her eyes were burning and her vision was blurring, and the hundred things she wanted to say collapsed into two sentences that came out barely louder than a whisper.
“I’ve changed? I’m the one who’s changed — or is it you p>
She lifted her face. Her cheeks were wet. She didn’t wipe them.
“I have asthma. I’m allergic to pollen.
Didn’t you know that p>
The words were quiet.
Almost gentle, really. The kind of quiet that comes not from calm but from a person who has run out of volume — who has spent everything louder and is left with only this: a fact, stated plainly, in a voice that couldn’t have intimidated a mouse.
But it landed like a grenade.
Callum went still. Not the controlled stillness of a man choosing his words — the involuntary stillness of a man who has just been shown something about himself that he can’t unsee. The color drained from his face in stages: tan to pale to something almost gray, as though the blood in his cheeks had decided, collectively, to be somewhere else.
Because he did know. Of course he knew. He’d known since she was six years old and her lips had turned the color of a winter sky during a school field trip and he’d sprinted — actually sprinted, an eight-year-old boy running faster than he’d ever run — to find a teacher, any teacher, someone who could help because Lara couldn’t breathe and her eyes were closing and he was certain, with the absolute certainty of a child, that she was going to die.
He’d known when he was twelve and had memorized the location of every inhaler in Miriam’s house. He’d known at sixteen when he’d jumped the Hargrove back fence — six feet of cedar, and he’d cleared it like it wasn’t there — because he’d heard through the wall that Lara was wheezing. He’d known at twenty-two when he’d read a forty-page medical paper on allergen-triggered bronchospasm because he wanted to understand what was happening inside her lungs when they failed her.
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He knew. He had always known.
And he had forgotten.
“I’m sorry,” Callum said. The words came out stripped of everything — no explanation, no qualification, no “but.” Just two syllables and the particular devastation of a man confronting his own negligence.
Declan’s reaction was different. Where Callum went still, Declan moved — a half-step forward, reflexive, the same instinct that used to launch him out of his chair in a classroom or over a fence in a backyard. His face was doing something complicated: guilt and defensiveness wrestling behind his eyes, neither willing to yield.
“Are you okay now?” He swallowed. “I’m sorry. It’s just — Bridget picked those flowers herself.
From the field outside Halcombe. She spent hours on it. That’s why I p>
He stopped. Perhaps he heard himself. Perhaps he heard the absurdity of citing a bouquet’s provenance as justification for forgetting a medical condition.
Either way, the sentence died unfinished, and what replaced it was silence — the heavy, airless kind, the kind that fills a room after something has broken that can’t be reassembled.
Lara said nothing.
There was nothing to say. They were sorry. She believed them.
And it didn’t matter — because sorry was a bandage on a wound that had been reopened so many times the edges no longer met.