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 open to flush the air.
Then they left.
Not dramatically — no slammed doors, no parting declarations. They simply collected their things and drove away, and the house settled into an emptiness that felt less like abandonment and more like relief.
Lara stood in the clean, flower-free living room and breathed.
For the next three days, their rooms stayed dark. Lara heard nothing from either of them — no calls, no texts, no midnight sounds of someone coming home late and trying to be quiet. The house was hers alone, and she used the solitude the way she used everything: practically.
She packed.
It was a strange archaeology, sorting through a life she was about to leave.
Clothes went into suitcases.
Books went into boxes. The small, accumulated objects of twenty years in Halcombe — a mug from a university café, a paperweight Callum had given her for her twenty-first birthday, a racing pennant Declan had pressed into her hands after his first professional win — were held, considered, and placed gently into a box labeled MISC.
She didn’t burn them. That would have been too easy.
When the packing was nearly done, Lara walked through the house the way you walk through a museum: slowly, noting details, aware that you’re seeing something for the last time.
The house was, technically, three houses. Lara had bought the middle one — a narrow Victorian terrace on Privet Lane — with the first real money she’d earned. It had a blue door and a garden the size of a parking space and a skylight in the bathroom that leaked when it rained, and she had loved it with the uncritical devotion you reserve for a first home.
Then Callum had bought the house to the left.
And Declan had bought the house to the right.
And walls had been knocked through, doorways widened, plumbing rerouted, until three separate lives had been architecturally merged into one.
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One-third of this structure was hers. The other two-thirds were theirs. Selling her portion would mean untangling the entire arrangement — legal, structural, emotional — and Lara did not have the time or the energy for any of those categories.
What she had was a real estate agent named Stewart, a man of cheerful competence and moderate ambition, who arrived on the same afternoon that Callum and Declan chose to come home.
The timing, as always, was terrible.
Stewart was standing in the living room, folder in hand, explaining comparable property values in the Privet Lane area when the front door opened and two men walked in — one in a tailored charcoal suit, the other in a leather jacket — and found a stranger in their house.
Callum’s face hardened into the expression he used on hostile takeover attempts. “Who are you, and what are you doing here p>
Stewart, to his credit, didn’t flinch. He’d dealt with intimidating homeowners before, though perhaps not two of them at once, both radiating the specific energy of men who considered this space theirs by more than just legal right.
“Gentlemen.” Stewart produced a business card with the smooth reflex of a man whose livelihood depended on not being thrown out of rooms. “I’m Stewart. Real estate agent. The owner of the property has engaged me to begin the sale process p>
The word “sale” hung in the air between the three of them like a lit match over dry kindling.
Callum and Declan looked at each other. Then at Stewart. Then at the staircase, from which Lara was now descending with the calm, unhurried gait of a woman who had been expecting exactly this moment.