Chapter 3
Chapter 3:
She’d stayed for them. That was the truth of it, stripped of everything decorative. Not for Halcombe’s eucalyptus air or Miriam’s sensible advice or the design career she’d built here. She’d stayed because two men had looked at her with a desperation that felt like devotion, and she hadn’t known how to walk away from that.
And then Bridget happened.
Bridget Nolan arrived at Lara’s design firm on a Monday in September, clutching a portfolio that was mediocre and a backstory that was devastating.
An intern — Lara had signed the paperwork herself. Twenty-three years old, with cheekbones that could cut glass and a manner so timid she flinched at the sound of the office printer.
The first sign should have been the lunches.
Every day, when the rest of the team streamed toward the elevator and the cluster of restaurants on Meridian Street, Bridget stayed behind. She’d wave off invitations with a small, tight smile — “No, no, you go ahead, really” — and then retreat to a corner of the break room where she ate the same thing each day: steamed buns and pickled vegetables from a plastic container. The kind of meal that spoke of carefully counted pennies and a life lived in the margins.
Lara found her there one afternoon, alone with her buns and her dignity, and made the mistake of asking.
The story came out in fragments — deliberately, Lara would later realize, like pieces of a puzzle arranged to form a very specific picture.
A family in the mountains. Parents who could barely afford the bus fare.
A scholarship that covered tuition but not food.
A girl who’d clawed her way to the city on talent and grit and was now surviving on the change she could save by not eating lunch.
Lara — who had grown up in the Ashworth household, where the silverware had monograms and the staff had a staff — heard this story and felt the exact emotion Bridget had intended her to feel: guilt, tenderness, and the particular form of noblesse oblige that makes wealthy people want to adopt their less fortunate colleagues.
She took Bridget under her wing. She covered her lunches. She stayed late to mentor her on designs.
And eventually — this was the part that mattered, the part that was perhaps the point of the entire performance — she began bringing Bridget along to dinners with Callum and Declan.
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The first dinner, Bridget had barely spoken. She’d sat at the edge of the table at Callum’s favorite Italian place, eyes wide, napkin folded on her lap with almost religious precision, and had laughed at all the right moments in all the right ways — soft, surprised, as though the very concept of joy were something she was experiencing for the first time.
By the third dinner, Callum — Callum, who cancelled social engagements the way other people cancelled spam subscriptions — was rearranging his schedule to attend.
By the fifth dinner, Declan — Declan, who had once told Lara that the only commitment he respected was a green light at the starting line — was letting Bridget talk him out of his weekend practice sessions.
The pattern established itself with a speed that should have been suspicious.
Callum, who avoided parties as a matter of principle, began making exceptions. “Bridget mentioned she’s never been to a proper dinner party,” he’d say, as though this were a humanitarian crisis requiring his personal intervention.
Declan, who had never in his life been talked out of anything by anyone, started yielding to Bridget’s lightest suggestions. “She worries,” he’d explain, with the baffled sincerity of a man who hadn’t yet realized he was being managed.
And the most remarkable thing — the thing that kept Lara up at night, turning it over like a stone — was that none of it was accidental.
Bridget didn’t stumble into their affections. She maneuvered. Quietly, carefully, with the patience of a woman who understood that men like Callum and Declan weren’t won through aggression but through the strategic deployment of vulnerability.
Every trembling lip was aimed.
Every tear was timed.
And Callum and Declan — who had spent twenty years loving Lara with a devotion that bordered on the architectural — had begun looking at someone else within thirty days.
A month. That was all it had taken.
Before Bridget, they had never been shy about their feelings. They’d staged elaborate dinners. They’d left flowers on her desk. They’d once had an actual argument — loud, public, spectacularly embarrassing — in the middle of a restaurant about which one of them Lara should choose, as though she were a prize at a county fair and they were both holding winning tickets.
Lara had felt something for them. She had. In the quiet moments, when Callum brought her tea without being asked, or when Declan made her laugh so hard she wheezed — in those moments, she had turned the possibility of choosing over in her mind like a coin, heads or tails, one or the other, knowing that either choice would cost her something irreplaceable.
But she’d never chosen.
And now the coin didn’t matter, because someone else had pocketed it.
Standing in her room, the silence from the party below pressing against the walls like something physical, Lara picked up her phone. She opened the clock app, scrolled to the timer function, and set a countdown.
Fourteen days.
The number sat on her screen, small and exact, and it felt like the first honest thing she’d done in weeks.
She was going back to Thornfield. She was going to marry a man she’d never met.
And she was going to stop pretending that the two people she’d arranged her entire life around still had room for her in theirs.
From now on, she told herself, she would no longer interfere in the lives of those three. The sentence formed in her mind with the clean finality of a door clicking shut.
Lara closed the bedroom door — gently, this time — and put in her noise-canceling earbuds. The bass from downstairs vanished. The laughter vanished. The world narrowed to the glow of her laptop and the quiet hum of the air conditioning.
She had a resignation letter to write, a Henderson account to finish, and two weeks’ worth of professional courtesy to dispense before she disappeared. She sat in front of the floor-to-ceiling window and opened her laptop, and the city of Halcombe spread out below her in the amber haze of early evening — all rooftops and traffic lights and other people’s lives, going on and on without her.
She worked. The sky bruised from gold to violet to the deep, starless black of a coastal city at night. Hours passed. The Henderson account yielded, reluctantly, to her focus.
When she finally pulled out her earbuds and stretched — her neck stiff, her eyes dry, her back aching with the particular complaint of someone who’d been sitting too long — the house below was silent.
No music. No laughter. No Bridget.
Just the tick of the hallway clock and the low murmur of a building settling into sleep.
Lara looked at the countdown on her phone. Thirteen days, twenty-two hours, and change.
She was right on schedule.