Chapter 27
Chapter 27:
Six hundred miles east, in a city Callum and Declan had never visited and a house they’d never seen, Lara Ashworth woke at five in the morning on the day she was getting married.
The room was unfamiliar. High ceilings, pale walls, curtains she hadn’t chosen — the guest suite of the Ashworth family home in Thornfield, a house she’d left at five years old and returned to three days ago as a stranger with a suitcase and a wedding dress she’d selected from a photograph. The sheets smelled of lavender and starch, and the window faced east, and the light that came through at this hour was thin and tentative, as though the sun itself wasn’t sure about today.
She hadn’t slept well. She’d slept the way people sleep before surgeries and exams and decisions that can’t be undone — in fragments, in layers, waking every hour to check the time and finding, each time, that less of it had passed than she’d hoped.
Today she was marrying Edmund Blackwell.
The name still felt strange in her mouth, like a word in a language she was learning.
Edmund Blackwell — a man she’d met five times.
Five. She could count the encounters on one hand: twice as children, when he’d been a solemn boy with cold fingers who pinched her cheeks with the territorial affection of a child who hadn’t yet learned other forms of tenderness. Once at a family gathering when she was fifteen and he was seventeen, where they’d exchanged approximately eleven words, most of them related to the location of the bathroom.
And twice in the past three days — brief, formal meetings arranged by their families, where they’d sat in a sunlit parlor and made the kind of conversation that people make when they’re trying to determine if they can tolerate each other for the rest of their lives.
The Ashworth elders spoke of Edmund the way they spoke of weather systems and stock markets: with respect, with a trace of awe, and with the understanding that he was a force beyond ordinary measurement. Harold — Lara’s grandfather, patriarch of the family, a man whose judgment was treated as a form of natural law — had selected Edmund personally. “The most remarkable young man of his generation,” Harold had said, and when Harold Ashworth said something, it tended to become true through sheer force of his having said it.
Dorothy and Harold, in their occasional calls to Halcombe, had mentioned Edmund’s name with the particular reverence parents reserve for the person they hope their child will marry — casually, repeatedly, the way you water a seed you’re pretending not to watch.
And now Lara was sitting at a vanity table in a house that felt like a museum, applying makeup with hands that wouldn’t stop trembling, about to marry that seed.
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She was nervous. The nervousness surprised her — she’d expected something cooler, something more controlled, the kind of detached composure she’d maintained through every crisis of the past month.
But her body had apparently decided, without consulting her brain, that getting married was a different category of experience than leaving two men and burning photographs, and it was producing adrenaline accordingly.
She checked her reflection. Then checked it again. Then adjusted her eyeliner by a millimeter that made no visible difference and checked it a third time.
The dress — the one with the high neckline, the one she’d chosen from Dorothy’s photographs in a dark bedroom in Halcombe with a bandaged leg and a broken trophy and a life in the process of being dismantled — fit her perfectly.
Dorothy had handled the tailoring.
Dorothy, it turned out, handled most things in Thornfield with the quiet efficiency of a woman who had spent twenty years waiting for her daughter to come home and had used the time to prepare.
At nine o’clock, Lara stood. Smoothed her dress.
Checked her reflection one final time — and saw, behind the makeup and the neckline and the careful architecture of composure, the face of a woman who was about to do something irreversible and was choosing to do it anyway.
She stepped into the hallway, and Edmund was there.
He was leaning against the opposite wall, dressed in a dark suit that fit him the way good suits fit men who don’t think about their suits — naturally, without effort, as though the fabric had arranged itself around him out of respect. His face was composed. His posture was relaxed.
But his eyes — light amber, almost golden, the kind of eyes that looked like they’d been lit from behind — were watching her with an attention that was neither casual nor intense. Just steady. The gaze of a man who was present.
He offered his arm. She took it. Her fingers trembled against the wool of his sleeve, and if he noticed — which he did, because Edmund Blackwell noticed everything — he gave no sign.
They walked toward the car in silence. The morning was crisp, the air carrying the particular Thornfield quality that Lara’s lungs remembered even if her conscious mind didn’t: dry, cool, faintly mineral, the air of a city built on stone.
In the car, halfway to the Civil Registry, Edmund reached into his jacket pocket and produced — without ceremony, without preamble — a small handful of wrapped candies. He placed them in Lara’s palm, one by one, the way you’d place coins in a child’s hand.
“If you’re nervous,” he said, “eating something sweet can help p>
His voice was low and unhurried. The voice of a man who had all the time in the world, even on the morning of his own wedding. His eyes — those amber eyes, warm as late-afternoon sunlight — held hers with a steadiness that felt, in that moment, like the most solid thing she’d encountered in weeks.
Lara looked at the candies in her palm. Then at Edmund. Then at the candies again.
She unwrapped one. Put it in her mouth.
Butterscotch. The sweetness spread across her tongue — warm, simple, uncomplicated — and something in her chest loosened. Not much.
But enough.
She unwrapped a second one without being asked.
Edmund smiled. It was a small smile — barely a movement, just the corner of his mouth and a shift in the light behind his eyes — but it was real, and it was for her, and Lara realized, with a surprise that felt almost like relief, that she might be marrying a man she could learn to like.