Chapter 39
Chapter 39:
The recovered data from Bridget’s phone was appended to the report.
Every deleted message, restored.
Every erased text, resurrected.
And there, at the bottom of the thread — sent the afternoon Lara had left Halcombe, sent while Lara was walking out the door of the house she’d lived in for twenty years — was the message:
“I’m sorry, Lala. I didn’t think a few words from me would make Callum and Declan set you aside again. When the four of us live together, take good care of us. p>
Declan read it twice. His jaw worked.
A vein in his temple pulsed with the slow, visible rhythm of a man whose blood pressure was doing something his doctor would not approve of.
He picked up Bridget’s phone — the recovered, unlocked, damning phone — walked to where Bridget sat on the floor in the corner of the living room, and dropped it in her lap.
“Read it,” he said. “Read it out loud p>
Bridget looked at the screen. Saw her own words.
And for the first time — the very first time — produced no tears. No performance. No trembling lip or glistening eye. Just the blank, hollowed expression of a woman who has been caught so completely that the machinery of deception has nothing left to produce.
Declan’s voice, when it came, was barely above a whisper — which was worse than shouting, worse than the table, worse than anything, because a whisper from Declan Thorne meant that the anger had gone past the point where noise was useful.
“How dare you speak to her like that. If it weren’t for Lara — if she hadn’t brought you into our lives, introduced you at our dinners, given you a career and a friendship and every chance you never earned — people like us would never have looked at you. You know that. You’ve always known that p>
Callum didn’t move from the sofa. His eyes were half-closed — not tired, but recessed, pulled back into the interior space where he made decisions that affected thousands of people and felt nothing about any of them.
“Nigel.” His voice was level. “Remove Miss Nolan’s belongings from the premises.
All of them.
Lɑtєst chαptєrs 𝑖n g𝒶l𝑛ovє𝓁ѕ.с𝓸m
And arrange transport for her family. They should arrive by the weekend p>
Nigel, who had been standing in the doorway with the folder and the expression of a man who wished he’d chosen a different career, nodded and began making calls.
What followed was efficient and total. Workers appeared — the same workers who had, days ago, moved furniture into this villa with care and optimism — and now moved through Bridget’s room with the opposite energy: packing, stripping, carrying.
Clothes went into garbage bags. Toiletries were swept off shelves. The rolling suitcase she’d arrived with — the single, modest case that had been part of her costuming, the visible proof of a woman who owned little — was filled and zipped and carried to the foyer.
Bridget sat on the living room floor and watched her things leave the house the way she’d watched them enter it: with the understanding that none of this had ever really been hers.
“Don’t take my things—” The scream came out thin, reedy, the sound of a voice that had been used for other purposes so long that genuine distress barely registered. “Please — don’t p>
No one stopped. No one turned. The workers moved with the mechanical indifference of men following orders from people who paid well and expected results.
Bridget’s hands fell to the floor. Her fingers spread across the marble tile — cool, smooth, expensive, the kind of floor she’d walked on for two months and would never walk on again. The tears that came now were different from every tear she’d produced before. They were ugly.
Graceless. The tears of a woman who had been performing sadness for so long that real sadness, when it finally arrived, had no choreography.
“It’s over,” she whispered to the empty room. “Everything’s over p>
The words were, for once, true.