Chapter 46
Chapter 46:
It took six days for Bridget to begin disappearing.
Not physically — she was still there, still walking, still breathing, still showing up at the apartment each night with the mechanical persistence of a person who hadn’t yet found a reason to stop.
But something behind her face was dimming. The features were the same — the wide eyes, the delicate mouth, the bone structure that had been her primary asset — but the thing that animated them, the calculating intelligence that had made them effective, was flickering like a bulb that had been left on too long.
She’d lost weight. Not the attractive, editorial kind of weight loss that designers approved of — the other kind, the kind that came from not eating enough and sleeping less than that, the kind that turned cheeks concave and wrists into anatomy diagrams. Her skin, which had glowed under the warm lights of Heron Lake Manor, had gone yellow-gray, the color of paper left in the sun.
On the seventh day, she broke.
Not gracefully. Not with a final, photogenic tear and a dignified exit. She broke the way people actually break: messily, desperately, with the wild, irrational energy of a person who has run through every option and is now running on fumes.
She went to Heron Lake Manor.
She knelt at the gate. Not because kneeling was strategic — strategic thinking had been stripped from her by six days of scrubbing floors and dodging Roy’s open hand — but because her legs gave out, and kneeling was what was left when standing became impossible.
“Mr. Hargrove! Mr. Thorne!” Her voice was raw. Stripped of the honeyed modulation she’d spent years perfecting, it was just a voice — thin, cracked, the voice of a woman screaming into a void. “I was wrong — I know I was wrong. I shouldn’t have hurt Lara. I recognize it. Please — I’m begging you p>
The villa was empty.
The windows were dark. The garden was maintained but uninhabited — the lawn mowed, the hedges trimmed, the fountain running, all the signs of a property that was being kept but not lived in.
Callum and Declan had moved back to Privet Lane. The house that Callum had bought back from Stewart in a moment of desperate sentimentality had become, ironically, the only place either of them could stand to be — the house where the memories were, the house where Lara’s absence had a familiar shape.
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Heron Lake Manor — the villa with the lake view and the heated floors and the four bedrooms that were supposed to be the beginning of something — sat empty.
A monument to a plan that had failed.
A beautiful, expensive, uninhabited mistake.
The security guard called Callum.
“There’s a woman at the gate. She says she knows you. She’s been kneeling for about an hour p>
Callum’s voice came through the phone with the flat indifference of a man answering a question about the weather. “Don’t worry about her. Let her kneel. She’ll leave when she realizes there’s no point p>
The guard hung up. Resumed his patrol. Walked past Bridget as though she were part of the landscaping.
She knelt through the afternoon. Through the evening. Through the night. Her knees went from sore to numb to something beyond feeling. The temperature dropped. The security lights came on, casting her in the sharp, theatrical glow of spotlights illuminating an audience of no one.
At some point — she didn’t know when, because time had stopped being a thing she tracked — her vision narrowed, and the ground tilted, and the last thing she registered before consciousness left was the cold, beautiful irony of fainting at the gates of a house where no one was home.