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>
Lara checked the airline app. The confirmation screen glowed blue in the dim bedroom — Flight 4471, Halcombe to Thornfield, departing 2:15 PM, arriving 6:47 PM.
A five-hour journey. The distance between two lives, measured in air.
“Around seven in the evening,” she said softly.
“Perfect. Your father and I will be at the gate. He’s been pacing the house all week — you know how he gets. He’s already reorganized the dining room twice p>
Lara smiled. She opened her mouth to reply — something about the dining room, something about her father’s nervous habit of alphabetizing the spice rack when he was emotional — but the bedroom door opened, and the words died.
Callum and Declan stood in the doorway.
They filled it the way they filled every doorway — Callum with his height and his stillness, Declan with his breadth and his restlessness — and the sight of them, framed against the hallway light, their faces caught between curiosity and something more guarded, produced in Lara the specific, exhausting sensation of being watched by two people who saw everything except the thing that mattered.
“Who were you talking to?” Declan asked.
Casual. The voice of a man reaching for a topic the way you reach for a light switch in a familiar room — without looking, expecting it to be where it’s always been.
Lara pressed the red button.
Dorothy vanished.
“No one p>
The word landed between them like a stone in a pond. No one. Not “my mother.” Not “Dorothy.” Not “the woman who is preparing a wedding for me in a city you don’t know I’m going to.” Just: no one.
The coldness of it registered on both their faces — a flinch, quickly suppressed, the kind of micro-expression you only catch if you’ve spent twenty years cataloguing someone’s face.
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And there it was again: the distance. The thing that had been growing between Lara and them for the past month, expanding by degrees, like ice forming across a lake — slow enough to ignore, until suddenly the water was gone and you were standing on something that could crack.
Callum spoke first. He hadn’t planned to — Lara could see the surprise on his own face, the words escaping before the board-meeting filter could catch them.
“Lala, Bridget is…
Different.” He chose the word carefully, turning it over like a chess piece before placing it. “She had a difficult childhood. I can’t help wanting to protect her. It’s not — there are no other intentions p>
The explanation hung in the air, earnest and insufficient.
Declan, who had never met a silence he couldn’t fill, jumped in. “It’s true. We just feel sorry for her.
And besides — you’re the one who introduced her to us. You brought her to our dinners. How can you be jealous of someone you introduced p>
Jealous. The word was a match thrown into a room full of gasoline, and Declan had tossed it with the breezy confidence of a man who didn’t realize he was standing in fumes.
“Why are you telling me this?” Lara asked.
The question was simple.
Five words.
But it landed like a trapdoor — a question they hadn’t expected, one that revealed the assumption beneath their speech: that Lara’s behavior over the past month had been motivated by jealousy, that her distance was a negotiation tactic, that all of this — the resignation, the suitcases, the burned photos, the sold house — was an elaborate performance designed to make them pay attention.