Chapter 2
Chapter 2:
They moved like a single organism. Two men, one impulse: get to Bridget.
Declan reached her first — he was always faster, the athlete in him incapable of not sprinting toward whatever was broken. He caught Bridget’s wrist with both hands and turned it over, examining the bruised knuckles with the kind of focused intensity he usually reserved for engine specifications.
Callum was a half-step behind, but his version of urgency was different — quieter, more controlled. He placed himself between Bridget and the doorway, as though the door itself might attack again, and his dark eyes swept over the situation with the cool assessment of a man who ran boardrooms for a living.
The assessment, apparently, did not land in Lara’s favor.
“If you don’t like Bridget, that’s fine.” Declan didn’t look up from Bridget’s hand. His jaw was tight, the words squeezed out between his teeth. “But this? This is low, Lara. When did you become like this p>
When did I become like this.
The question lodged somewhere beneath Lara’s ribs like a splinter. She opened her mouth — to explain, to defend, to say that Bridget had put her own hand in the doorframe, that the timing was a coincidence, that she hadn’t even seen — but Callum was already speaking, and Callum’s disappointment was a particular kind of weapon. Quiet. Precise.
Devastating.
“Lara, today is Bridget’s birthday.” He didn’t raise his voice. He never did. “You shouldn’t have been so extreme p>
Then he looked down at Bridget, and the ice in his expression thawed so quickly it was almost obscene.
“Does it still hurt? Here — I’ll take you to get some medicine on it p>
And just like that, he scooped Bridget up as if she were something that might shatter further, and carried her toward the stairs.
Declan trailed behind them, one hand hovering near Bridget’s back, his voice tumbling over itself with consolation.
“Don’t be sad, Bridget. Listen — you know the new car I got? The Porsche? It’s yours.
After the party, I’ll take you for a ride. We’ll go wherever you want p>
Your next chapter awaits gⱯlnσν𝑒ls․cøm
Bridget — cradled, comforted, flanked — let out a small, brave sniffle. “Thank you, Callum.” A beat. Then she turned those enormous eyes toward Declan, and her voice went soft as cotton. “But Declan…
Don’t go racing anymore. It’s so dangerous. I’d worry about you p>
Declan Thorne.
A man who had driven at three hundred kilometers per hour without blinking.
A man who had once told Lara that the day he stopped racing would be the day they buried him. That man looked at Bridget Nolan’s trembling lip and said:
“Of course. Whatever you say, Bridget.
As long as you’re happy p>
Lara stood in the doorway and watched the three of them descend the staircase — Callum’s broad back, Declan’s restless hands, Bridget tucked between them like something precious — and felt the specific kind of loneliness that comes not from being alone, but from being in a room that used to be full.
She’d been here before. Not literally — she’d been in this doorway a thousand times — but in this feeling. The feeling of watching Callum and Declan walk away from her and toward someone else.
A month ago it would have stung. Two months ago it would have broken something. Now it just felt like pressing on an old bruise: the memory of pain, but not pain itself.
They’d been hers, once.
Both of them. In different ways, for different reasons, but hers all the same.
She had known Callum and Declan since she was five years old.
Before that — before Halcombe, before the neighbors, before any of it — Lara had been a fragile child in a house that smelled of rain and worry. She’d been born in Thornfield, where the climate was a living thing: damp, heavy, relentless. The kind of air that wrapped around your lungs and squeezed.
For a girl with asthma, it was like growing up inside a wet fist.
So at five, her parents made the decision that would shape everything after. They sent her south to Halcombe, where the air was warm and dry and tasted like eucalyptus, to live with her Aunt Miriam — a doctor, a pragmatist, a woman who believed most problems could be solved with proper ventilation and early bedtimes.
Callum and Declan lived next door. The Hargrove boy and the Thorne boy.
Already inseparable at six and seven, already forming the kind of childhood alliance that would calcify, over time, into something unbreakable.
And then Lara arrived — thin, pale, trailing an inhaler and a suitcase — and everything shifted.
They appointed themselves her guardians with the solemnity of children who had discovered a cause. They walked her to school. They walked her home. They pooled their pocket money to buy her milk and breakfast, as though she were a stray kitten they’d decided to adopt. When other boys tried to pass her love letters in middle school, Callum and Declan intercepted and destroyed them with a territorial efficiency that would have impressed the Secret Service.
Years passed. The boys grew into men.
Callum took the helm of Hargrove Group at twenty-four, all sharp suits and sharper decisions, and became the kind of CEO whose name appeared in financial magazines beside words like “meteoric” and “uncompromising.” Declan went the other way — louder, faster, brighter — and became one of the most decorated racing drivers in Halcombe, a man whose face decorated billboards and whose idea of relaxation was doing something at very high speed.
They were different in almost every conceivable way.
But on one subject they agreed absolutely: Lara.
They bought the houses on either side of hers. They knocked down walls, merged the properties, moved in. They came home every night — from the boardroom, from the racetrack — and they cooked for her. Two grown men, successful beyond measure, competing over who could make a better risotto on a Tuesday.
When Lara’s health stabilized and her parents asked her to come home to Thornfield, Callum and Declan had shown up at her door with red eyes and clenched jaws and voices that kept breaking.
“Don’t leave,” Callum had said, and the fact that Callum Hargrove — who negotiated billion-dollar deals without blinking — couldn’t get through three syllables without his voice cracking had almost undone her.
“We’ll follow you,” Declan had added, as though this were a reasonable thing to say. “Wherever you go. We’ll sell everything. We don’t care p>
They’d always promised to be wherever she was.
And Lara, who had never learned how to be loved by two people at once without feeling like she was failing at least one of them, had stayed.