Chapter 20
Chapter 20:
Callum’s heart was doing something it hadn’t done since he was seventeen and had nearly told Lara he loved her at a bus stop in the rain. It was beating too fast, and too loud, and in a rhythm that suggested his cardiovascular system knew something his brain hadn’t caught up with yet.
Another type of relationship. The words played on a loop in his skull, and each repetition added a new layer of meaning — hope, then doubt, then hope again, then a flicker of something darker that he pushed away before it could take shape.
He was about to speak — to ask what she meant, to pin down the ambiguity, to do what he always did in negotiations: get clarity, get terms, get commitment — when the driver appeared in the hallway.
“Miss Ashworth, shall I take your luggage down p>
The man was already reaching for the nearest suitcase. Lara stepped forward and placed herself between him and her bags with the quiet authority of a woman guarding something more important than clothing.
“You go on ahead. I’ll bring my own things p>
Declan, who processed frustration the way sports cars process fuel — quickly, loudly, and with visible exhaust — threw his hands up.
“How are you going to carry four suitcases alone? This is ridiculous, Lara. Stop being stubborn. I was wrong — about the flowers, about the trophy, about all of it. I know that. Will you please just let us help p>
It was, by Declan’s standards, a substantial apology. He’d used the words “I was wrong,” which was a phrase Declan Thorne employed approximately twice per decade, and he’d said “please,” which happened even less frequently. Under other circumstances — in a different month, in a different version of this story — it might have been enough.
Lara looked at him.
At the genuine distress on his face, at the hands that had once reached into a fire to save her photographs, at the man who had pushed her into a table during an asthma attack and was now standing here, asking for forgiveness in the only language he knew: loudly.
“I really don’t need help,” she said.
And then, because the truth was sometimes kinder when it wore a costume: “Go help Bridget. She’s alone, she’s fragile, she can’t manage things herself. She needs you more than I do p>
𝐿𝑎t𝑒st ch𝑎pt𝑒rs in
The sarcasm was faint — a seasoning, not a flavor — but Callum caught it. His eyebrows drew together, the way they did when he spotted an inconsistency in a quarterly report.
Then, with the timing that had become as predictable as sunrise, Bridget called.
Her voice spilled from Callum’s phone on speaker — thin, helpless, pitched at the exact frequency that bypassed male rationality and connected directly to the protection reflex.
“Callum, Declan, can you come help me? I’m so clumsy. I can’t do anything right. The boxes are too heavy and I don’t know where anything goes and I’m all alone here and p>
The men exchanged a glance. The glance contained an entire conversation: she’s alone, she needs us, but Lara — but Lara says she doesn’t need us — but Lara’s being difficult — but Bridget is actually asking — and Lara just told us to go.
It took four seconds.
Four seconds for twenty years of devotion to lose a tug-of-war against thirty days of novelty.
Callum pocketed his phone. “Bridget can’t manage alone. I’ll go help her p>
Declan grabbed the car keys. “I’m going too p>
They were leaving.
Again. They were walking toward the door, toward their cars, toward Bridget and her boxes and her helplessness, and Lara was watching them go the way she’d watched them go a dozen times over the past month — from the same hallway, through the same door, toward the same woman.
But this time was different, and the difference was simple: this time, they wouldn’t be coming back.
At the door, Callum stopped. He turned.
And in his face — just for a moment, just long enough for Lara to see it and file it away in the part of her memory reserved for things that almost happened — there was fear.
“Lala, I know you don’t want to hear this right now.
But I reserved a table at Rossini’s tonight.
After the move, after everything’s settled — let’s have dinner. The three of us. I’ll explain about Bridget.” He paused. “I’ll explain everything p>
He left before she could answer. Which was strategic, or it was cowardice, or it was both — the line between them had always been thin with Callum.
Declan followed, his keys jingling, his footsteps heavy with the urgency of a man running toward the wrong emergency.
The front door closed.
Lara stood in the empty hallway and listened to the sound of two engines starting, one after the other — Callum’s sedan, then Declan’s Aston Martin — and then the crunch of tires on gravel, and then silence.
Explanations later.
Dinner at Rossini’s.
A conversation that would fix everything, that would rewind the past month, that would make the flowers and the trophy and the push and the asthma and the Midsummer Night make sense.
There would be no later. There would be no dinner. There would be no explanation, because some things don’t have one.
Her phone buzzed. One last message from Bridget, arriving with the precision of a final bullet.
“I’m sorry, Lala. I didn’t think a few words from me would make Callum and Declan set you aside again. When the four of us live together, take good care of us. p>
Lara read the message. Read it again.
And for the first time in weeks, she felt no anger. No hurt. No bitterness. Just a clean, crystalline clarity — the kind that comes when you’ve been staring at something in dim light for a long time and someone finally turns on the lamp.
She typed her reply: “The most important thing is that the three of you live well together. I’ll sit this one out p>
Send.
Block Bridget.
Block Callum.
Block Declan.
Three taps. Three small sounds. Three doors closing, one after another, like the chambers of a heart shutting down in sequence — not dying, just reorganizing. Redirecting blood flow. Learning to beat for someone else, or maybe just for herself.
She deleted the contacts. Watched the names vanish from her phone — Callum Hargrove, Declan Thorne, Bridget Nolan — each one winking out like a star going dark, until the screen was clean and the directory was lighter and twenty years of accumulated history had been reduced to empty space.
Lara picked up her suitcase. Looked around the room one last time — at the bed she’d slept in for two decades, at the skylight that leaked when it rained, at the floor-to-ceiling window where she’d watched a thousand Halcombe sunsets turn the city amber and violet and black.
She didn’t take a photograph. She didn’t whisper a goodbye.
She walked out the front door, closed it behind her, and didn’t look back.