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 reluctance, Declan’s with the scrawl of a man who signed things without reading them on principle.
When Lara saw the completion date — the date the property transfer would be finalized, the mortgages dissolved, the architectural union of three houses officially ended — she felt something click into place with the silent precision of a well-made lock.
The date was the same day as her flight to Thornfield.
She hadn’t planned it.
But it was perfect. She would sign the final papers, hand over the keys, walk to the car, drive to the airport, and leave. No gap between the end of one life and the beginning of another. No window of time in which Callum or Declan might notice the suitcases were gone, the closets were empty, the room that had been hers for twenty years had been returned to the condition of a hotel room after checkout: clean, anonymous, containing no evidence of the person who’d slept there.
When she signed her name on the last page — Lara Ashworth, in the careful, slightly old-fashioned handwriting Miriam had taught her — her pen didn’t waver.
Now there was only one thing left to do.
She went shopping alone. The department store on Ashfield Road was quiet on a Wednesday afternoon — just Lara and a handful of other women moving through the aisles with the purposeful calm of people buying things they’d already decided on. She selected a massager — the good kind, the kind that costs enough to make you wince at the register — and a pair of jade bracelets that caught the light the way Miriam’s eyes caught a joke: with warmth, and with an edge.
The taxi to Miriam’s took twenty minutes. Lara spent them looking out the window at Halcombe — at the palm-lined boulevards and the Art Deco facades and the coffee shops where she’d spent a thousand unremarkable afternoons — and tried to memorize it, the way you memorize a face you’re about to stop seeing.
Miriam opened the door before Lara could knock.
Discover your escape on
She must have been watching from the window. She must have seen the taxi pull up, seen Lara step out with a shopping bag in one hand and a suitcase in the other, and understood — with the immediate, wordless comprehension of a woman who had been a doctor for thirty years and a surrogate mother for twenty — that this was a goodbye.
The embrace was instant and total. Miriam was not a tall woman, but she hugged as though she were trying to absorb the other person entirely — arms tight, chin hooked over Lara’s shoulder, the faint scent of surgical soap and the chamomile tea she drank by the gallon.
“Lala.” Her voice was steady, which meant she was working very hard to keep it that way. “It’s really going to be hard to let you go, sweetheart. You’ve been mine for twenty years. I know you’re not technically mine, but you’ve been mine, and now p>
She stopped. Swallowed. Tried again.
“Now you’re going home. Which is right. Which is how it should be p>
Lara’s throat ached. She pressed her face into Miriam’s shoulder and smelled the chamomile and the soap and the particular, indefinable scent of a house where she had been safe — genuinely, uncomplicatedly safe — for most of her life.
“I’m going to miss you,” Lara said. “But we’re family. Planes exist. High-speed trains exist. I’ll be back for New Year’s. You won’t even have time to miss me properly p>
“I already miss you properly,” Miriam said, pulling back and holding Lara at arm’s length to look at her — the long, evaluating look of a woman who wanted to remember every detail. “But fine.
Come in. Sit down. I took three days off work specifically to spoil you, and you are not leaving this house until I’ve fed you everything in my refrigerator p>
She wasn’t joking. Over the next two days, Miriam cooked with the focused intensity of a woman waging war on departure. Lara’s favorites appeared in relentless succession: the roast chicken with lemon and thyme that Miriam made on birthdays. The potato gratin that took three hours and used an unconscionable amount of butter. The chocolate tart — Miriam’s only concession to dessert — with a crust so short it crumbled at the touch of a fork.
They ate together. They talked about nothing and everything — about Lara’s childhood, about patients Miriam couldn’t save, about the time Callum and Declan had tried to cook a Thanksgiving turkey at age fifteen and had nearly set fire to the kitchen. They laughed at things that weren’t funny and went quiet during things that were.
On the last evening, sitting at Miriam’s kitchen table with empty plates and full hearts, Lara told her.
“I have to go. The wedding is in three days p>
Miriam nodded. She’d known this was coming — had been watching Lara pack and unpack her suitcase, had been reading the departure in every gesture and glance — but knowing and hearing are different injuries, and the hearing landed visibly.
She blinked. Once, twice. Reached into the drawer beside her — the junk drawer, the one that contained batteries and takeout menus and the accumulated detritus of a practical life — and pulled out an envelope.
“I have three surgeries that day. Life-and-death ones, the kind I can’t reschedule.” She placed the envelope in Lara’s hands. It was thick. “This is what I feel, since I can’t be there to say it in person. You must be happy, Lala. You must p>
Lara looked at the envelope.
At Miriam.
At the kitchen that had been the safest room she’d ever known.
“I will,” she said. “Grandfather chose the groom. You know he wouldn’t choose badly p>
Miriam made a sound that was half-laugh, half-sigh. “Your grandfather has excellent judgment in business and terrible judgment in cardigans.
But yes — I trust him with this p>
They held each other for a long time. Miriam’s grip didn’t loosen.
Then the elevator dinged.
Lara heard it first — the mechanical chime, followed by the slide of doors, followed by footsteps. Multiple footsteps.
And voices, two of them, speaking in the low murmur of men arriving somewhere they considered home.
The elevator opened, and there they were: Callum on the left, Declan on the right, and between them — tucked neatly into the space where Lara had always stood — Bridget Nolan.