Chapter 47
Chapter 47:
She woke in her apartment.
Someone had found her — the guard, presumably, or a passing neighbor — and deposited her back at Elmwood Terrace the way you’d return a stray animal to its address. She was on the floor of the studio, still in yesterday’s clothes, and through the thin walls she could hear Roy and Marge arguing in the kitchen.
“We need to leave today. This isn’t working p>
“She’ll run again — she’s got legs and she’s stubborn. Let’s go while she’s still passed out. Take what we can carry p>
Bridget’s eyes opened. The voices registered.
And the meaning — they were leaving, they were going to take her, they were going to drag her back to the village the way you’d drag a suitcase — triggered something that was less thought than reflex: run.
She was on her feet and through the door before Roy could finish his sentence.
Barefoot. Phone in hand — because the phone was the one thing she always kept close, the one instrument of connection in a life that had run out of connections. She took the stairs rather than the elevator. Hit the building’s entrance at a sprint.
Didn’t look back.
On the street, barefoot and breathless, with nowhere to go and no one to call, Bridget’s mind did what it always did in crisis: it searched for the person most likely to help. The person most likely to forgive. The person whose defining characteristic — whose fatal flaw, whose beautiful, exploitable weakness — was kindness.
Lara.
“She’ll forgive me,” Bridget whispered. She was standing on a sidewalk in Halcombe at six in the morning, barefoot, in clothes she’d slept in, talking to herself. “She always forgives. She’s made that way. If I can get to her — if I can explain — she’ll help me. She always helps p>
She walked to the train station.
Bought a ticket to Thornfield with the last money in her phone’s digital wallet.
Boarded the high-speed train. Sat in coach class with her bare feet tucked under the seat and her face reflected in the window — hollow, gray, unrecognizable — and watched the countryside blur past like a life in fast forward.
Your source:
In Halcombe, the news traveled fast. Nigel informed Callum.
Callum informed Declan.
And both men had the same reaction, instantaneous and identical: if Bridget reached Lara before they did, the narrative would shift.
Bridget would cry.
Bridget would beg.
And Lara — Lara, who was built for forgiveness the way a bridge is built for weight — might forgive her.
And in forgiving Bridget, she might soften toward them.
And if she softened toward them, she might let them back in.
And if she let them back in, then Bridget, of all people, would be the one who’d made it possible.
This was intolerable.
Callum dispatched a team to Thornfield.
Declan dispatched his own. The mission was simple: intercept Bridget before she reached Lara. Not violently. Not dramatically. Just…
Ensure that the woman who had tried to kill Lara with flowers did not get a second audience.
In Thornfield, Edmund’s security — the same men who had escorted Callum and Declan to a helicopter a week earlier — were already in position.
Callum and Declan’s teams encountered them immediately. Two private security forces, facing each other across the geography of a city neither employer actually lived in, engaged in the quiet, professional standoff of men whose salaries depended on not backing down.
Halcombe and Thornfield. Two cities. Two sets of men. Two invisible armies, mobilized by love and loss and the particular, intractable stubbornness of people who will not accept that they’ve already lost.