Chapter 36
Chapter 36:
The room had changed.
Not physically — the same coffee table, the same lamps, the same warm yellow light that had made Heron Lake Manor look like a home in a magazine.
But something in the air had rearranged itself, the way air rearranges before a storm: same molecules, different charge.
Bridget felt it the way small animals feel barometric pressure — not as knowledge but as instinct, a tightening at the base of her skull that said: the rules have changed.
Declan’s grip on her wrist hadn’t loosened. His fingers — the fingers that had cradled roses, that had reached into a fire to save photographs, that had once cupped Bridget’s face with the exquisite care of a man handling something precious — were pressing into her skin with enough force to leave marks. Not bruises. Not yet.
But the promise of them.
“Won’t you tell us the truth p>
His voice was conversational. That was the frightening part. Not shouting — Bridget could handle shouting. Shouting was loud and hot and burned itself out. This was different. This was the voice of a man who had moved past anger into something colder, something with patience, something that would wait.
He looked at Callum. “It seems we need to persuade her p>
Callum sat on the opposite sofa with the boneless stillness of a predator conserving energy. His fingers tapped the armrest — a slow, metronome rhythm, each tap landing with the precision of a man who counted things for a living. When he spoke, his voice was lower than Declan’s, quieter, and somehow worse.
“Bridget.” He didn’t use her nickname. He’d never used a nickname — Callum wasn’t a nickname person — but the full name, delivered in that particular register, landed with the weight of a legal document. “Do you want to keep your job p>
The question was rhetorical.
Bridget knew it was rhetorical. The answer was obvious — of course she wanted to keep her job; her job was the scaffolding that held her entire constructed life in place, the salary that paid for the apartment and the clothes and the distance between her and the village she’d left — but Callum wasn’t asking. He was informing.
“Because if you’d prefer to go back to your village with nothing — no references, no contacts, no one in Halcombe who’ll take your call — then by all means, keep your mouth shut.” The tapping stopped. The silence that replaced it was heavier than the sound had been. “But if you’d like to leave this conversation with anything resembling a future, I’d recommend speaking clearly. Now p>
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The words landed on Bridget like a sentence being read in a courtroom. Not a threat — something more precise than a threat.
A description of consequences, delivered with the clinical detachment of a man who had ruined careers before and found the process unremarkable.
Bridget’s tears stopped.
Not gradually — not the slow diminishing of a storm passing — but abruptly, as though a tap had been turned off. The tears, which had been flowing with their usual photogenic reliability, simply ceased, and what was left on Bridget’s face was something Callum and Declan had never seen there before: the naked expression of a woman whose primary tool had just been declared useless.
She looked from one to the other with genuine confusion — not the performed, wide-eyed confusion she’d deployed a hundred times, but the real thing: the bewilderment of a person discovering that a key she’d used for months no longer fits the lock.
Before, tears had been enough. Tears had been the universal solvent that dissolved their suspicion, redirected their anger, transformed their scrutiny into concern. One sob, one trembling lip, one glistening eye — and Callum would soften, and Declan would melt, and the conversation would pivot from interrogation to comfort with the seamless reliability of a machine.
The machine was broken.
Bridget’s hands hung at her sides. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again. She turned to Declan — Declan, who had always been the softer target, the more emotional one, the man whose protective instincts she could trigger with the precision of a pianist striking a key.
“Declan, I haven’t done anything.” Her voice was small.
Careful. Testing the frequency, looking for the resonance point that would activate the old response. “Can you believe me? Please? Lala helped me so much. I’m so grateful to her. How could I possibly do something to hurt her p>
She paused.
Assessed. Tried a different angle.
“If the person in your hearts is her, then… I can move out. I don’t want to be a problem p>
The offer to leave — the sacrifice play, the gesture of noble self-removal designed to provoke the response it pretended to enable: No, don’t go, we need you, stay — was Bridget’s last card. She played it with the weary confidence of a gambler who’s been winning all night and doesn’t realize the house has changed the deck.
“Could it be,” Bridget continued, her voice dropping to a near-whisper, calibrated for maximum intimacy, “that Lala is upset because I moved in? She started acting differently before I came. Maybe it’s the same thing this time p>
She was redirecting. Reframing. Shifting the narrative from what Bridget had done to what Lara had felt — a sleight of hand so practiced it was almost invisible: the problem isn’t me, the problem is her jealousy. I’m just the innocent variable. She’s the unstable one.
It had worked before.
Every time.
For a month.
Declan looked at her. His bloodshot eyes, raw from sleeplessness and a helicopter ride and the worst thirty-six hours of his life, held Bridget’s gaze with a steadiness that was new — not the warm, protective steadiness she’d cultivated, but something harder. Something that had been forged in the empty living room of a house on Privet Lane, sitting on a bare floor at four in the morning, staring at the wall and understanding, finally, what he’d done.
He didn’t soften.