Chapter 68
Chapter 68:
He got out of the car. Stood in the hospital garage. His face was white — the color of paper, the color of absence — and his shirt was soaked, and his hands were shaking, and the man who had once driven at three hundred kilometers per hour couldn’t sit in a parked sedan without his body believing it was about to die.
Callum was leaning against a pillar. He’d been watching — not intervening, not commenting, just present, the way he’d been present in the hospital room and in the ambulance and in every moment since the intersection. He offered nothing except proximity. No advice. No encouragement. No platitudes about time healing or therapy helping or the future being bright. Just his presence, which was, in its silent, stubborn way, the only thing that had been constant.
Declan looked at him. His voice, when it came, was hoarse — the voice of a man who hadn’t been using it much.
“Why are you still here?” A pause. “Have you given up on Lara p>
Callum’s eyes drifted to the garage’s exit — to the light outside, to the city, to the sky above Halcombe that was gray and familiar and bore no resemblance to the golden light of Thornfield.
“What else could I do p>
The question was not rhetorical. It was an inventory — an accounting, delivered in the flat tone of a man reviewing a ledger that showed only losses.
During the four months of Declan’s rehabilitation, Callum had not stopped. He’d written letters — actual letters, on actual paper, because emails could be blocked and texts could be deleted but paper had to be physically received and physically discarded, and the act of discarding was, itself, a form of acknowledgment. He wrote about their childhood.
About the games they’d played.
About the photograph at sixteen — blurry, badly framed, perfect.
About the time Lara broke her arm and they’d carried her to the hospital in pajamas.
About the night she’d stayed up with him when his father was ill, sitting on the floor of a hallway saying nothing, because her presence was the saying.
About the twenty years of ordinary, accumulating, irreplaceable moments that constituted a love he had never declared properly and had now lost the right to declare at all.
He wrote twelve letters. He received no responses.
Your next journey starts at gⱯlnσν𝓮ℓs․𝒸o𝗺
Not silence — Lara’s inbox was managed, and the letters arrived, and they were read. He knew this because Miriam, who still communicated with Callum in the careful, rationed way of a woman who hadn’t entirely given up on him, confirmed that Lara had opened them.
But opening was not responding. Reading was not reciprocating.
And the absence of a reply was, itself, a reply — the most eloquent one possible, the reply that said: I have heard you, and I have nothing to add.
Lara had told Edmund everything. This, too, Callum learned through Miriam — learned that the letters, the photographs, the stories of their childhood, had been shared. Not as secrets — as history. Lara had given Edmund her past the way you give someone the keys to a house: completely, without holding any back, because the house was theirs now, and all the rooms should be open.
And Edmund had received it. Had read the letters. Had looked at the photographs. Had listened to the stories of three children who’d grown up together and loved each other in ways that were real and insufficient.
And he had not been jealous. Had not been threatened. Had looked at the evidence of twenty years of devotion and recognized it for what it was — not a rival, but a preface. The chapter that came before him. The part of Lara’s life that had made her the woman he’d married, and that he could honor precisely because it was over.
Callum understood this — understood it in the way you understand the results of a test you’ve failed. He’d seen, in the rare, distant glimpses he’d caught of Lara’s life in Thornfield, the thing that made his position impossible: Lara loved Edmund. Not with the confused, paralyzed, undeclared love she’d felt for Callum and Declan — the love that had been too entangled with habit and fear and history to ever become what it should have been. She loved Edmund with something cleaner. Something that had been born in freedom rather than obligation. Something that expressed itself not in twenty years of proximity but in twelve days of choice — and the choice, the deliberate, unconstrained choosing of one person by another, was the thing that Callum had never received and could not manufacture.