Chapter 24
Chapter 24:
They stayed in the house on Privet Lane until dawn.
Not by decision — by inertia.
By the inability to leave a place that still smelled, faintly, impossibly, of Lara’s shampoo.
By the gravitational pull of a house that had been the center of their universe for twenty years and was now, suddenly, a monument to something that had ended while they weren’t watching.
They sat on the living room floor because the furniture was gone.
All of it — couches, tables, the rug with the ghost-outline on the hardwood — had been loaded onto trucks and ferried to Heron Lake Manor hours ago, back when the day still had a plan and the plan still included Lara. What remained was architecture: walls, windows, floors. The bones of a life without the body.
Callum leaned against the wall beneath the window, legs extended, his cracked phone in his lap. He hadn’t spoken in over an hour. The CEO who negotiated in six languages, who gave keynote speeches to rooms of five hundred, who had once talked a hostile board out of a coup with nothing but vocabulary and nerve — that man had nothing to say.
Declan sat against the opposite wall, facing Callum across the empty room like a chess piece that had run out of moves. His phone was in his hand, screen dark, a list of outgoing calls to Lara — thirty-seven of them, the counter had stopped at thirty-seven — all unanswered, all routing to a voicemail box that was, as of this afternoon, full.
Between them: six meters of bare hardwood and twenty years of shared history and the growing, inescapable understanding that they had done this to themselves.
The thought was there, in the room, as present as a third person. Neither of them said it aloud. Saying it would make it structural — would turn a feeling into a fact — and neither Callum nor Declan was ready for that particular load-bearing truth.
But it was there.
When Lara was with them, there was never silence. There was always something — a question, a joke, a plan, a disagreement about dinner, a debate about a film, the small, continuous music of three people who had learned to harmonize.
Callum would provoke.
Declan would escalate. Lara would mediate, or laugh, or throw a cushion, and the house would hum with the specific energy of people who belonged to each other.
gⱯlnσν𝓮𝓁s․𝒸оm hosts thrilling adventures
Now the house was quiet in a way that houses shouldn’t be. Quiet like a hospital corridor at midnight. Quiet like the space after a gunshot. The kind of quiet that has weight.
Bridget called.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Declan’s phone lit up at regular intervals — every fifteen minutes, with the mechanical persistence of an alarm — and each time, Bridget’s name appeared on the screen, and each time, Declan watched it ring and did not answer.
He couldn’t explain why.
A month ago — a week ago — he would have answered before the second ring. He would have run to her, comforted her, offered her whatever she needed.
But tonight, with Lara’s absence pressing down on him like a physical weight, the thought of hearing Bridget’s voice — sweet, helpless, needing — produced something he hadn’t expected: exhaustion. Not anger, not blame. Just a profound, marrow-deep tiredness, the kind that comes when a spell breaks and you realize you’ve been standing in a room that’s been on fire for a month and you didn’t notice because someone was playing music.
The temperature dropped. Halcombe nights were mild, but the house — empty, unheated, stripped of everything that insulated it against the world — grew cold in a way that wasn’t entirely physical.
At some point past three in the morning, Callum stood. His knees cracked. His back protested. He was thirty-two years old and he felt a hundred.
“We should go,” he said. His voice was raw from disuse.
Declan nodded. Neither moved.
Five more minutes passed. Then ten. Then Callum walked to the door and Declan followed, and they drove to Heron Lake Manor in separate cars, in separate silences, through empty streets that reflected their headlights back at them like questions they couldn’t answer.
The villa was lit. Warm.
Expensive.
Bridget was asleep on the sofa.
She’d curled herself into the corner cushions like a child waiting for parents who’d stayed out too late, her phone still in her hand, the screen displaying a call log that was ninety percent Declan’s name. The warm yellow light of the lamps gave her sleeping face a softness that, under other circumstances, might have moved them.
It didn’t.
“Why haven’t you gone to bed?” Declan’s voice came out harder than he intended — edged with something that wasn’t quite directed at her but landed on her anyway, the way rain falls on whoever happens to be standing outside.
Bridget startled awake. Her eyes — those wide, dark, perpetually startled eyes — found Declan and then Callum, and what she saw in their faces made her sit up very straight.
Callum was already walking toward his room. He didn’t stop.
Didn’t turn. Over his shoulder, his voice carried the flat finality of a door being locked.
“It’s late.
Go to sleep.
Don’t wait up for us in the future p>
The word “future” hung in the air after his door closed, vibrating with implications he probably didn’t intend and Bridget definitely heard.
She stood in the living room, alone, in a villa that was supposed to be the beginning of something and was instead, already, feeling like the aftermath of something else. She looked at Callum’s closed door. Then at Declan’s. Then at the empty hallway between them.
Something had changed. The math had changed. With Lara present, Bridget was the newcomer, the addition, the exciting variable that disrupted a stable equation. Without Lara, she was just…
A woman in a house with two men who had run out of reasons to perform.
Bridget went to her room and closed the door.
She sat on the bed. She picked up her phone.
And with the methodical calm of a woman who understood evidence the way a lawyer understands it — not emotionally, but strategically — she opened her message history with Lara and deleted every text she’d sent.
The provocations. The taunts. The photo of the princess dress. The message about the family heirlooms. The final, poisonous “take good care of us.” All of it — gone.
Erased. The digital record of a campaign that had worked exactly as intended, scrubbed clean in thirty seconds of thumb-work.
Lara might have left voluntarily.
But if anyone ever looked at the messages, they would find nothing. No evidence that Bridget had pushed. No proof that the exit had been manufactured.
She set the phone on the nightstand, turned off the lamp, and lay in the dark with her eyes open, calculating.