Chapter 25
Chapter 25:
Sleep didn’t come for any of them.
Callum lay on his back in the master bedroom — a room he’d chosen for its size and its view of the lake, back when he’d imagined Lara standing at the window, looking out at the water, saying something about the light — and stared at the ceiling. His mind, which was engineered for strategy, for sequencing, for the disciplined organization of information into actionable plans, had gone blank. Not calm-blank. Not meditative-blank. The blank of a machine that has encountered an input it wasn’t built to process.
Lara was gone. He could state this fact. He could repeat it. He could not, apparently, understand it.
He ran through the logistics: Thornfield was six hundred miles away. The Ashworth family was well known there — old money, old name, the kind of family whose address appeared in society directories and whose patriarch, Harold, was spoken of with the particular reverence reserved for men who had built things that lasted.
Finding the house wouldn’t be difficult.
Finding Lara inside it — that was a different problem.
Because Lara hadn’t simply left. She had hidden. She had concealed her plans, fabricated explanations, maneuvered them into selling a house that she’d never intended to move into. She had wanted to disappear.
The question that kept circling, the one that landed on Callum’s sternum like a stone and refused to move, was: did she want to be found?
Down the hall, Declan was asking himself a different version of the same question — more urgently, more impatiently, in the way Declan approached all questions: as problems to be solved immediately, by force if necessary.
He grabbed his phone and called Miriam.
The phone rang six times. Seven.
Eight. Then Miriam’s voice — tired, clipped, the voice of a surgeon at three in the morning who had just finished closing someone’s chest and was now being asked to manage someone else’s emergency.
“Declan. It’s the middle of the night. What is it p>
He could hear the hospital in the background — the muffled beep of monitors, the squeak of shoes on linoleum, the particular hum of a building that never sleeps. Miriam was probably still in scrubs. Probably still had surgical gloves on.
Find your favorite stories at.com
And here was Declan, calling to ask about a girl who’d left town.
He asked anyway.
“Miriam, do you know where Lala’s house in Thornfield is? She’s gone — she left today, no warning, nothing. She packed everything and flew to Thornfield and she won’t answer her phone. I need to find her p>
The silence on the line lasted four seconds. In surgical terms, four seconds was an eternity — time enough for a complication, for a decision, for a life to change direction. Miriam used those four seconds to choose her words with the precision she applied to sutures.
“Don’t you know why Lala left?” A pause. Then, carefully: “She told me you two already knew p>
The sentence trailed off. In the space where it ended, Declan heard something he recognized from twenty years of knowing this woman: the sound of Miriam catching herself. The audible flinch of someone who has just realized they’ve revealed a room they were supposed to keep locked.
So Miriam knew. She knew, and Lara had told her, and the fact that Lara had told Miriam and not them — had confided in her aunt and not in the two men who had spent twenty years being her everything — landed on Declan’s chest like a physical blow.
“What do you mean, she told you we knew?” His voice was taut.
A wire about to snap. “Knew what, Miriam? What are we supposed to know p>
Miriam’s recovery was quick.
A lifetime in medicine had taught her how to manage crises mid-conversation, how to redirect without appearing to redirect, how to close an incision she hadn’t meant to open.
“I got confused, Declan. I’m exhausted — I just came out of a six-hour surgery. Lala simply wanted to go home and see her parents. She hasn’t seen them in years. You two were busy with the move, so she didn’t want to bother you p>
The lie was competent. Professional, even.
But Declan had grown up with Miriam. He’d eaten her cooking. He’d scraped his knee in her garden. He knew the texture of her voice when she was being honest and when she was performing, and right now, Miriam was performing.