Chapter 69
Chapter 69:
He could do nothing but give up.
The sentence existed in his mind as a fact rather than a decision — the way gravity is a fact, the way the earth’s rotation is a fact. He didn’t accept it. He simply stopped resisting it, the way a swimmer stops fighting a current and lets it carry him where it was always going to carry him.
Declan heard Callum’s words — “What else could I do?” — and felt the last light go out.
If Callum had given up — Callum, who never gave up, who had built a career on the refusal to yield, who had once spent eleven months negotiating a deal that everyone told him was dead — then it was over. Truly. Structurally. In the way that a bridge is over when the pilings have been removed: not damaged, not weakened, but absent. The thing that had connected them to Lara no longer existed, and no amount of engineering could rebuild it, because the riverbed had changed.
He was a broken man. He knew this with the diagnostic clarity of a person who had been an athlete and understood bodies: his body was repaired but his mind was not, and the car that he couldn’t sit in without drowning in sweat was proof that the damage was in a place that surgery couldn’t reach. He couldn’t race. He couldn’t drive. He couldn’t compete with Callum, who was still whole and still powerful and still, despite everything, the more viable candidate — and if Callum couldn’t reach Lara, then Declan, in his diminished, trembling, garage-sweating state, had no chance at all.
They returned to their respective homes.
The sentence was simple. The reality it described was not.
Callum went back to the Hargrove Group. The company had suffered during his absence — not critically, not fatally, but enough to require the particular, obsessive attention that had once been distributed between work and Lara and was now concentrated entirely on work, because work was the only remaining recipient. He arrived at the office at six in the morning and left at midnight. He attended meetings and reviewed contracts and made decisions that affected thousands of people and felt, about none of it, the thing he’d once felt about a woman who read with her lamp tilted fifteen degrees.
The Blackwell subsidiary in Halcombe grew.
Edmund’s presence — indirect, commercial, expressed through balance sheets rather than phone calls — was a constant reminder: a building with the Blackwell logo, visible from Callum’s office window, occupying the skyline like a flag planted in conquered territory.
Callum didn’t fight it.
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Fighting required an energy he’d redirected. The war with Edmund — the commercial confrontation that everyone in Halcombe’s business community had expected and some had anticipated with the enthusiasm of spectators at a boxing match — never materialized. Not because Callum couldn’t fight, but because the thing that had fueled the fight was gone.
Edmund wasn’t his rival.
Edmund was Lara’s husband.
And husbands, unlike rivals, couldn’t be defeated by strategy.
Declan tried.
Again and again, with the stubborn, repetitive persistence that had defined his racing career — the willingness to crash and rebuild and crash and rebuild until the car did what he wanted — he attempted to overcome the thing that lived in his nervous system like a parasite. He sat in cars. He gripped steering wheels. He turned ignition keys and felt his body betray him, every time, with the same flood of sweat and the same racing heart and the same overwhelming, non-negotiable conviction that the car was going to kill him.
Therapy helped, the way painkillers help: it managed the symptoms without curing the disease. He learned techniques — breathing exercises, visualization, the cognitive reframing that therapists prescribed like medication. He could sit in a car for ten minutes instead of two. He could start the engine without hyperventilating. He could, on good days, drive to the end of the block before the shaking began.
But he couldn’t race. The part of him that had raced — the part that had looked at a racetrack and seen possibility instead of danger, speed instead of death, joy instead of fear — was gone. It had been left at the intersection, in the wreckage of a sports car that had been carrying him toward a woman who didn’t want to be reached, and it wasn’t coming back.
Little by little, they stopped seeing each other.
Not deliberately — not with the conscious, declared ending of a friendship, the way Lara had ended theirs. The disconnection was slower, subtler, the kind of erosion that happens when the thing holding two people together is removed and the remaining bond isn’t strong enough to hold on its own.