Chapter 42
Chapter 42:
Vivienne called Gwendolyn Thorne before Bridget’s cheek had finished swelling.
The call lasted eleven seconds. Vivienne spoke in the clipped, information-dense shorthand of a woman who had been co-managing family crises with Gwendolyn for thirty years: “Heron Lake. Now.
Bring your temper p>
Gwendolyn arrived in nine minutes — a time that suggested she’d been exceeding the speed limit with the cheerful disregard for traffic laws that her son had inherited, along with his jaw structure and his inability to sit still.
She was a different species of mother than Vivienne. Where Vivienne was ice, Gwendolyn was fire — a woman whose emotional register ran from warm to incendiary with very little middle ground. She was tall, sharp-featured, with the kind of presence that filled rooms the way weather fills a valley: totally and without negotiation. She’d been a trial attorney before Declan was born, and the courtroom had never entirely left her; she still argued as though a jury were watching, still gestured as though exhibits needed to be presented, still delivered closing statements at the dinner table.
She read the investigation report standing up, because Gwendolyn Thorne didn’t sit down for anything that made her angry. Her eyes moved across the pages with the speed of a woman who had spent two decades reading depositions, and with each paragraph, her expression darkened — past annoyance, past anger, into the particular territory of maternal fury that exists beyond language.
The Midsummer Night detail stopped her. She read it twice. Set the page down. Looked at her son.
“You brought this woman to my house,” she said. “On Midsummer Night. The night we set a place for Lara. The night your father brought out the family jade. You brought her p>
Declan didn’t speak. His jaw was locked. His eyes were on the floor.
Gwendolyn turned to Callum. “And you. You let Vivienne show this woman the Hargrove pearls. The pearls your grandmother wore to her wedding.
For a strategy.
For a game p>
Callum said nothing. There was nothing to say. The facts were in the folder, and the facts were indefensible.
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Gwendolyn reviewed the section on the flowers — on Bridget’s internet searches, on the deliberate weaponization of pollen against a woman with asthma — and the sound she made was not a word. It was something closer to the sound a building makes before the demolition charge fires: a low, structural groan of something that has been holding itself together and has decided to stop.
She crossed the room in three strides.
Grabbed Bridget by the collar of her sweater — the expensive sweater, the one purchased with borrowed money and worn in houses she had no right to enter — and pulled her to the villa’s garden fountain.
The fountain was ornamental.
Decorative.
A gentle cascade of water over polished stones, designed to create ambient peace and the illusion of nature in a garden that had been landscaped to within an inch of its life. It was not designed for what Gwendolyn did with it.
She pushed Bridget’s head beneath the stream.
The water wasn’t deep — barely a few inches over the stones — but water entering the airways doesn’t need to be deep. It needs only to be present.
Bridget’s hands clawed at the fountain’s edge. Her legs kicked. The sounds she made were submerged, liquid, desperate — the sounds of a body discovering, with violent immediacy, what it feels like when air is replaced by something that won’t sustain you.
Gwendolyn held her there.
Five seconds. Ten. Long enough for the message to be delivered — not verbally, not intellectually, but physically, in the language that the body understands before the mind: this is what helplessness feels like. This is what it feels like to be unable to breathe. This is what you did to Lara, in a living room full of flowers, while my son picked up roses.