Chapter 41
Chapter 41:
She arrived the way she did everything — with purpose, with velocity, with the particular energy of a woman who had raised a CEO and considered herself, not unreasonably, responsible for his character. She was sixty-one years old, five foot six, immaculately dressed even at short notice, and her face, as she entered the living room, carried the expression of a woman who had already decided someone was guilty and was arriving to pass sentence.
She opened her mouth. The first syllable of what would have been a blistering reprimand was forming — directed at Callum, who stood by the window with the resigned posture of a man awaiting trial — when Callum raised one hand and extended the manila folder.
“Read this first p>
Vivienne hesitated. Looked at the folder. Looked at Callum. Looked at Bridget, who was sitting on the floor with a phone clutched to her chest and the remnants of strategic tears still drying on her cheeks.
She took the folder. Opened it. Read.
The transformation was visible. It moved across her face the way weather moves across a landscape — not gradually, but in waves: surprise first, then comprehension, then a cold, settling fury that was nothing like the hot, protective anger she’d arrived with. This was the other kind. The kind that came from realizing you’d been manipulated. The kind that came from discovering that the tears you’d been moved by were a performance, that the girl you’d been kind to was a predator, that the family heirlooms you’d brought out of the safe — the Hargrove pearls, the jade setting that had been in the family since Vivienne’s own wedding — had been shown to a woman who was engineering the destruction of the person they’d always been meant for.
Vivienne set the folder down. Straightened her back. Turned to Bridget.
She crossed the room with the measured stride of a woman who had spent forty years maintaining composure in society events and boardroom dinners and the particular humiliations of marriage to a powerful man — and was now, for the first time in recent memory, choosing not to maintain it.
She grabbed Bridget’s hair. Pulled.
And slapped her across the face with the open-palmed, full-armed swing of a woman who had been raised not to hit and was making a deliberate, considered exception.
The sound was sharp.
Final. The kind of sound that ends a conversation more effectively than any words.
galnσνels.c○m hosts fresh updates
Bridget’s cheek went white, then red, then began to swell — a bloom of color spreading across her face like a stain.
“Vivienne—” Bridget’s voice was a wreck. “Why — Callum doesn’t want to admit what he did to me, so he’s making up p>
“Enough p>
One word.
Delivered with the flat, absolute authority of a woman who had been a Hargrove for forty years and a judge of character for sixty-one.
“Bridget, no one knows my son better than I do.” Vivienne’s voice was cold.
Callum’s kind of cold — the genetic variety, the family trait, the ice that ran in the Hargrove bloodline like a mineral in the water. “And as a woman who has lived through these things, I can tell you with certainty: there has been nothing between you and my son. Nothing. I would know.
A mother always knows p>
She stepped back. Looked at Bridget the way she looked at a stain on white linen: with the understanding that it would need to be removed, and the regret that it had been allowed to form.
“For what you’ve done, Lara might forgive you someday. She’s built that way — she forgives.
But the Hargrove family will not.
And the Thorne family will not p>
She paused. Let the names land.
“Because Lara is ours. She has been ours since she was five years old and Callum carried her piggyback through the garden and Declan picked her wildflowers and both of them fought over who got to sit next to her at dinner. She is ours, Bridget.
And you tried to take her from us.
And for that, there is no forgiveness that I am willing to offer p>