Chapter 28
Chapter 28:
The Civil Registry of Thornfield was a sandstone building with columns that aspired to grandeur and a waiting room that aspired to nothing.
Fluorescent lights. Plastic chairs.
A potted fern that was either dying or had always looked like that. The kind of place where the most important legal decisions of people’s lives were processed with the aesthetic care of a post office.
Lara found this oddly comforting. There was no romance here to live up to, no cathedral expectations, no string quartet she’d have to pretend to be moved by. Just paperwork and signatures and a woman behind a desk who had processed six hundred marriages this year and would process six hundred more and viewed each one with the same benign administrative neutrality.
She let Edmund guide her through it.
Fingerprints — her thumb pressed into the ink pad, leaving a whorl of identity on government paper. Signatures — Lara Ashworth, in the handwriting Miriam had taught her, appearing for the last time beside a name that was about to change. The joint photograph — shoulder to shoulder, their expressions caught between formality and something less defined, a look that photographers at civil registries had seen a thousand times: not love, not joy, but the particular, concentrated seriousness of two people standing at the edge of something.
Edmund stood beside her through all of it, patient and present, his hand at the small of her back — not guiding, not possessive. Just there.
A point of contact that said: I’m here. You’re not doing this alone.
When the clerk pressed the final seal into their marriage certificates — two red booklets, embossed, official, the bureaucratic equivalent of a starting gun — Lara held hers and felt the weight of it in a way that had nothing to do with paper.
She was married. She was someone’s wife. The word sat in her mind like a new piece of furniture in a familiar room — present, undeniable, requiring adjustment.
She almost smiled.
And then two voices — simultaneous, desperate, cutting through the fluorescent calm of the registry office like glass breaking in a library — shattered everything.
“Lala p>
They were at the door.
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Both of them.
Callum and Declan, standing in the entrance of the Thornfield Civil Registry like men who had arrived at the scene of an accident minutes too late. Their chests were heaving. Their clothes were rumpled — the same clothes they’d been wearing yesterday, Lara realized, the same suit and leather jacket, unwashed, unslept-in, carried across six hundred miles on a red-eye flight and a taxi ride and the desperate, animal hope that there was still time.
Their eyes found the red marriage certificates first.
The color hit them the way red always hits: viscerally, at the brainstem, before the thinking brain can intervene. Red. The red of official seals and legal finality and a door that had been closed and stamped and filed.
Callum’s face went through a rapid, visible sequence — confusion, disbelief, recognition, denial — like a man watching a building collapse floor by floor, each stage more devastating than the last. His voice, when it came, was stripped of everything that made him Callum Hargrove: the control, the authority, the certainty. What was left was a question asked by a man who already knew the answer and was asking anyway, the way a drowning person calls for help.
“Lala, did you get married p>
They didn’t want to believe it. The certificates burned in their vision, but the mind has a remarkable capacity for rejecting evidence that threatens its fundamental architecture. They looked at the certificates and saw red. They looked at the rings — matching bands, simple, gold, sitting on Lara’s and Edmund’s fingers with the quiet permanence of decisions that have been made — and saw something that couldn’t be true.
Declan was frozen. His face cycled through expressions — anger, hurt, disbelief — before landing on something that was worse than all of them: hope. The forced, desperate, pathological hope of a man who was going to deny reality until reality physically restrained him.
“Lala.” His smile was a wound trying to close. “Where did you find this actor? His acting’s terrible. Honestly. You can stop now. Joke’s over p>
He was pointing at Edmund.
At Edmund Blackwell, who stood beside Lara in a tailored suit with a marriage certificate in his hand and the calm, unperturbed expression of a man who was not, by any conceivable definition, acting.
Lara looked at them.
At the rumpled clothes and the red eyes and the desperation that poured off them like heat from an engine — and felt something she hadn’t expected. Not satisfaction, not vindication, not the cold triumph of a woman who had finally been chased. Just a deep, quiet sadness. The sadness of being too late — not hers, but theirs. The sadness of watching two people arrive at the right answer after the test has already been collected.
“He’s not an actor.” Her voice was level. She’d practiced this — not the words, but the tone. The tone of a woman who had already grieved this moment and was now simply living through it. “I’m sorry to disappoint you.
As you can see p>
She held up the red booklet. Turned it so the gold lettering caught the fluorescent light. Marriage Certificate. The words glinted.
“—I got married p>
Edmund, who had been observing the exchange with the attentive stillness of a man watching a chess game he wasn’t playing, chose this moment to step forward. He placed his arm around Lara’s waist — gently, but with the unmistakable clarity of a man drawing a line — and turned to face the two men in the doorway.
“Hello.” His voice was polite in the way that expensive hotels are polite: immaculate, warm, and containing within it the implicit understanding that he was the one who owned the building. “Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Edmund. Lala’s husband p>
The word “husband” detonated silently in the space between the five of them.
Edmund’s amber eyes moved from Callum to Declan with the unhurried assessment of a man who was accustomed to being the most powerful person in any room he entered. He didn’t puff up. He didn’t posture. He simply stood there, with Lara at his side and a marriage certificate in his hand, and radiated the particular, infuriating confidence of someone who had already won and saw no need to gloat about it.