Chapter 56
Chapter 56:
Declan knew how hard he’d hit. He knew — with the precise physical self-awareness of a man whose career depended on knowing exactly how much force to apply to a brake pedal at three hundred kilometers per hour — that the punch had been a graze.
A performance. The kind of contact that reddened skin without bruising bone.
And Edmund knew it too. They both knew it.
And the fact that Lara didn’t — the fact that she was holding Edmund’s face and examining the mark with the worried tenderness of a woman attending to a genuine injury — was the most devastating thing that had happened in a day that was already overflowing with devastation.
“I didn’t hit him!” Declan’s voice cracked. “He’s not hurt — look at him, Lala, he’s fine! He turned into it on purpose! He wanted you to see it! He’s playing you the way p>
He stopped. The sentence he’d been about to finish — “the way we played you” — arrived at his lips and died there, because even Declan, even in this state, could hear the irony of accusing another man of manipulation while standing in the wreckage of his own.
He reached for Lara’s hand. One last attempt — physical, desperate, the grasp of a man who’d been taught, by a lifetime of racing, that letting go was the one thing you never did.
Lara pulled her hand away.
The motion was small.
A retraction of a few inches.
But it carried the weight of twenty years of accumulated touch — every hand-hold, every shoulder-squeeze, every casual, familial contact that had been the currency of their relationship — withdrawn in a single gesture. She pulled her hand from Declan’s the way you pull a plug from a socket: cleanly, completely, with the understanding that the connection was over.
“This is the Ashworth house,” she said. Her voice was steel sheathed in silk. “My home. I’m not going with you p>
She paused. Let the word “home” resonate — home, not Halcombe, not Privet Lane, not the house where they’d grown up together. Home was here now. Home was Thornfield, and the Ashworth estate, and the man beside her whose cheek she’d just been cradling.
“And I find it remarkable that after hitting someone, you won’t even admit what you did p>
The accusation was surgical. It wasn’t about the punch — not really. It was about the pattern. The pattern of doing damage and denying it. The pattern of hurting Lara and calling it strategy. The pattern of setting her aside and calling it a plan. The pattern of an entire month of cruelty reframed as love.
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“Callum.
Declan.” Her voice changed.
Dropped into the register she used for final things — the register of resignation letters and blocked phone numbers and doors that close for the last time. “We’re not friends anymore p>
The word “anymore” was a blade. It acknowledged that they had been friends — that the twenty years were real, that the love was real, that the Wednesday dinners and the hospital runs and the childhood games and the shared history were real — and then it amputated them.
Cleanly. Surgically. With the precision of a woman who understood that healing required cutting.
“I don’t want you at my wedding. I rescind the invitation. You didn’t come here with good intentions — you came to disrupt, to reclaim, to drag me back into an orbit I’ve already left.
And I won’t allow it p>
She took Edmund’s hand. Their fingers interlaced — naturally, without performance, the gesture of two people who had developed a physical vocabulary in twelve days that was, somehow, more fluent than the one Lara had spent twenty years developing with Callum and Declan.
They walked toward the Ashworth gates. The guards — stone-faced, uniformed, part of the architecture of a family that had been protecting its own for generations — formed a line between the retreating couple and the two men on the pavement. The message was clear: you may stand here, but you may not follow.
Callum and Declan stood.
They stood as the gates closed. They stood as the afternoon light faded into the long, golden twilight that Thornfield wore like a crown. They stood as the stars appeared — different stars from Halcombe’s, arranged in the same constellations but somehow colder, more distant, as though even the sky had taken sides.