Chapter 40
Chapter 40:
Bridget Nolan had one card left, and she played it from the floor.
Her things were being carried out of the villa around her — bags, shoes, the toiletries she’d arranged on the bathroom shelf with the careful precision of a woman decorating a shrine to a life she was borrowing — and the sound of it, the zippers and the footsteps and the businesslike murmur of workers who didn’t know her name and didn’t care to learn it, formed a kind of soundtrack to the end of everything.
But Bridget had survived worse than this. She’d survived a village with no running hot water. She’d survived parents who valued her brother’s education over hers and then complained when she left. She’d survived the first year in Halcombe — lonely, broke, sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a shared apartment with three strangers and a persistent mold problem. She’d survived by understanding, earlier than most people, that survival wasn’t about strength. It was about knowing who held the power and making them believe you deserved their protection.
Callum and Declan were lost. She could see that — could see it in the ice behind Callum’s eyes and the violence behind Declan’s hands.
But their mothers were a different matter. Their mothers had been kind to her. Their mothers had shown her family heirlooms. Their mothers existed in a generation that still believed tears were currency, that a young woman crying was a young woman in trouble, and that the correct response to trouble was intervention.
She picked up her phone. Her fingers were shaking — not from performance, this time, but from the adrenaline of a cornered animal executing its last option.
She called Vivienne Hargrove.
The phone rang twice. Vivienne answered with the warm, slightly breathless voice of a woman who kept her phone close and her family closer.
“Bridget? What is it, dear p>
Bridget produced a sob. It was a good one — wet, ragged, the kind that comes from the throat rather than the eyes, the kind that suggests a wound too deep for composure.
And then, with the precision of an actress delivering the line that turns the audience:
“Vivienne…
Callum is mistreating me p>
She let the sentence trail off. Incomplete. Loaded. The ellipsis doing more work than any noun could — because an unfinished accusation is worse than a finished one. “Mistreating” could mean anything. “Mistreating” followed by silence could mean everything. The listener’s imagination would fill in the rest, and imagination, Bridget knew, always filled in something worse than the truth.
The effect was immediate. Vivienne’s voice transformed — went from warm to furious in the space between one heartbeat and the next, the way only a mother’s voice can change when she believes her son has committed an unforgivable act.
“Wait right there. I’m coming now. If Callum has laid a hand on you — if he’s done anything — I don’t have such a son.
Do you hear me? I do not have such a son p>
The line went dead. Vivienne was already moving.
Callum, who had been watching Bridget make the call with the cold attention of a man observing a rat in a trap reach for the last piece of cheese, felt something shift behind his composure. Not anger — he’d been angry before, and this had moved past anger.
Disgust. The particular, bone-deep disgust of a man who was watching someone attempt to use his mother as a weapon against him.
“Who,” he said, very quietly, “do you think you are p>
Bridget clutched the phone to her chest. The phone was everything now — the instrument of her rescue, the lifeline to a woman who would walk through the door and believe her, who would override her son’s rage with maternal authority, who would restore the order that had just been demolished.
Declan put a hand on Callum’s shoulder. The gesture was steady — not restraining, not comforting.
Grounding.
“Leave it,” Declan said. His voice was tired. “She’s desperate.
Desperate people do stupid things. Your mother isn’t going to take a stranger’s word over her own son’s p>
Callum exhaled. Released his jaw. Stepped back.
Twenty minutes later, Vivienne Hargrove walked through the front door of Heron Lake Manor.