Chapter 54
Chapter 54:
Lara let the silence hold for a moment — let Edmund’s words finish their work, let the truth settle into the space between the five of them like sediment in still water. Then she spoke.
Her voice, when it came, was not angry. Not cold. Not triumphant. It was something rarer and more terrible: clear. The voice of a woman who had spent weeks processing an emotion and had arrived, finally, at the other side of it — at the place where the pain had been composted into understanding and the understanding had produced something that looked, from the outside, like peace.
“Callum.
Declan.” She looked at them. Really looked — the way she’d looked at them a thousand times in twenty years, except this time the looking was a leaving. “Now I understand something I didn’t understand before p>
She paused.
Chose her words with the care of a woman placing stones across a river — each one deliberate, each one load-bearing.
“Maybe I never loved you p>
The words entered the air and rearranged it.
Callum flinched — a small, involuntary contraction of the face, the kind of flinch that happens before the conscious mind can intervene.
Declan didn’t flinch. He froze. The difference was worse.
“I felt something for you.
Both of you. Something real, something deep, something that shaped my entire adult life.” She was speaking slowly, as though translating from a language she’d only recently learned. “But I don’t think it was love. I think it was — proximity. Habit. The comfort of being known.
And maybe, if you’d given it time — if you’d been patient, if you’d let it grow instead of trying to force it — maybe it could have become love p>
She shook her head. The gesture was small and final.
“But you extinguished it yourselves.
Before it had the chance to become what it could have been. You extinguished it with Bridget, and with flowers, and with every time you chose her helplessness over my presence.
– check it out!
And now it’s gone, and there’s nothing to reignite, because the fuel has been used p>
She said it with relief. Not cruelty — relief. The specific, physical relief of a woman who has been carrying a question for years and has finally found the answer, and the answer, although sad, is lighter than the question.
“If you want to attend my wedding, then come. I accept.
But I don’t want you there to cause trouble. I don’t want scenes. I don’t want declarations p>
She looked at Edmund.
At his hand in hers.
At the red mark on his cheek where — but that hadn’t happened yet. That was coming.
“I’m happy now,” she said.
Three words. Simple. True.
And devastating in their simplicity, because they contained, by implication, the thing she didn’t say: I wasn’t happy before. With you.
For twenty years. I wasn’t happy.
Callum’s response was reflexive — the words of a man whose negotiation instincts were firing even as his emotional architecture was collapsing.
“Lala, I don’t want you to be with someone else.” His voice was thin. Strained. The voice of a man trying to hold a door shut against a flood. “We’ve been friends since childhood. I understand you — your habits, your fears, your silences. We’re meant for each other. We p>
He was reaching. The words were reaching. They were the words of a man grabbing at handholds on a cliff face, finding each one crumbling, reaching for the next.
Declan had stopped reaching.
Something in Lara’s speech — maybe “I never loved you,” maybe “you extinguished it,” maybe just the tone, the terrible, peaceful clarity of a woman who was done — had pushed Declan past the point where words were available. Past the point where strategy functioned. Past the point where anything operated except the raw, animal refusal to accept a loss that his body could not process.
His eyes went red. Not with tears — with something older, something preverbal, something that lived in the brainstem where language hadn’t reached. His fists clenched. The tendons in his forearms stood out like cables.
And his gaze — which had been moving between Lara and Callum and the pavement and the sky — locked onto Edmund.