Chapter 52
Chapter 52:
She reached for his hand. The gesture was instinctive — not strategic, not performed for the benefit of the men outside the window, but reflexive, the way you reach for something solid when the ground shifts.
Edmund’s fingers closed around hers. He squeezed once. Smiled.
“Shall we p>
He opened his door. Stepped out.
And then — in a gesture that Lara had not anticipated and that Callum and Declan could not have prepared for — he walked around to her side of the car, opened her door, and lifted her out.
Not helped her out. Lifted her. His hands at her waist, her feet leaving the car and touching the pavement in a single, fluid motion that was equal parts courtesy and claim. The kind of gesture that said, in the universal language of male territorial display: she’s mine, and I’m comfortable with that, and I’m not performing it for your benefit — I’m performing it for hers.
Lara’s face, when her feet touched the ground, was the color of a sunset.
They stood together — fingers interlaced, shoulders touching — and faced Callum and Declan across three feet of Thornfield pavement. Two couples, except that one was a couple and the other was two men who used to be something and were now trying to figure out what.
Declan spoke first, because Declan always spoke first, and because the sight of Lara’s fingers interlaced with Edmund’s was producing in him a physical sensation that could only be discharged through speech.
“Lala, we’ve been friends since childhood. We grew up together. How can you look at us like — like we’re strangers p>
Lara’s expression was the one she’d developed over the past month in Halcombe — the one that had replaced warmth with distance, affection with assessment. The expression of a woman who had recalibrated her relationship with two men and was now enforcing the new parameters.
“I don’t need to hear this,” she said. Her voice was composed. Not cold — Lara had moved past cold. She was in the temperature range beyond cold: the room-temperature of indifference, which was worse because it suggested that the heating system had been permanently disconnected. “I need to go home. If you have something to say, say it p>
Declan opened his mouth.
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Callum closed it for him — not physically, but with a look, the kind of look that two men who’ve known each other for thirty years can deploy to communicate volumes in a fraction of a second. The look said: let me. I have a strategy.
Callum stepped forward. His face was the boardroom face — controlled, serious, stripped of everything extraneous — but beneath it, Lara could see the effort it was costing. The muscles of his jaw were working. His eyes, which she’d known for twenty years, held something she’d never seen there before: not confidence, not strategy, not the CEO’s unshakeable certainty that every problem had a solution.
Fear. The quiet, desperate fear of a man who was about to tell the truth and understood that the truth was the last thing he had, and if it didn’t work, there was nothing behind it.
“Lala, what we did was wrong p>
Five words. Simple. The foundation of what came next.
“We didn’t love Bridget. We never loved Bridget. She was — she was a tool.
A strategy.” The word tasted bad in his mouth; Lara could see it, the way his lips tightened around it. “We wanted to make you jealous. To force you to choose.
Because you wouldn’t choose, Lala — for years, you wouldn’t choose, and we couldn’t live in that limbo anymore, and we thought — we thought if we showed you what it felt like to lose us, you’d finally p>
He stopped. Swallowed.
“We didn’t imagine you’d leave. We didn’t imagine Bridget would become what she became. We didn’t imagine any of this p>
He gestured — at Edmund, at the Rolls-Royce, at the stone walls of the Ashworth estate, at the city of Thornfield that had closed its gates against them.
At the entire, catastrophic landscape of consequences that their elegant strategy had produced.
“We were wrong.
And I’m telling you because you deserve to know — not because it changes anything. Not because it’s an excuse.
Because you deserve to know what happened and why p>
The confession hung in the Thornfield air — heavy, complete, irreversible — and Lara looked at the man who had just delivered it and felt, for the first time since she’d left Halcombe, something that was not anger and not indifference but something in between. Something that hurt.