Callum
Chapter Eleven
He'd been staring at his cell phone for twenty minutes.
Holland's contact photo: three years old, the deck of the Morrison lake house, her hair blown sideways across her face, her mouth open mid-laugh.
Something he'd said. He couldn't recall what it was.
He couldn't recall the last time she'd laughed around him at all—not like that, not unguarded, with the kind of helpless joy he hadn't seen in years.
"Mr. Hart, this is Elaine Morrison. I'm calling because I've left three messages with your office this week and no one has returned them."
"Elaine, I apologize. We've had some internal scheduling confusion. Let me—"
"I don't want an apology, Callum. I want the boathouse conversion revisions Holland promised me back in March. She said she'd have them by the fifteenth. It's now the twenty-second, and I've heard nothing."
The boathouse conversion. His mind went blank. The Morrison account was Holland's territory. He scanned his desk again for a file that wasn't there, a timeline he'd never seen, for drawings he couldn't begin to describe.
He stalled, the words sounding flimsy even to him. "Holland’s been out of the office. Let me have Laura pull the files and—"
"I don't want Laura." Elaine's voice went crisp. "I've worked with Holland for six years. She understands what we want. The last time Laura Vale was on a call with us, she spent twenty minutes trying to upsell us on a glass staircase we didn't ask for."
He hadn't known about the glass staircase. A sharp, proprietary irritation tightened behind his ribs.
"I’ll make sure Holland gets back to you personally by end of week.”
"See that she does." Elaine hung up.
Callum set the receiver down and looked at his phone again.
Holland’s name at the top of the call log, sitting there unanswered.
The boathouse revisions were promised in March, so she’d been working on them for months.
They had to exist somewhere—in her files, her email, her head—and he had access to none of it, because she had stopped answering his calls.
Fourteen texts in five days. Seven voicemails. One email from Mara Ellison’s office, formal and bloodless, redirecting all personal and legal communication through counsel and all project communication through official channels.
He’d read that email four times. Each time, the same subject line stared back at him: Hart v. Hart — Petition for Dissolution of Marriage.
He'd called it partnership. It covered seven years of her late-night solutions and structural fixes—her encyclopedic knowledge of every footing, beam, and client. He'd told himself it was support. But the word felt thin now, a coat of paint over the load-bearing wall he'd refused to name.
Laura let herself in mid-sentence, still talking to someone in the hall.
Laura entered, tablet in one hand, coffee in the other. Dressed in cream-colored wool, she set the cup on the edge of his desk without asking, her expression one of practiced confidence—the look she wore when she believed she had a solution.
"The Alden estate team is asking for a decision on the stair hall," she said, settling into the chair across from his desk. "David's crew can't proceed without a revised load-bearing spec, and the client is getting nervous. I told them we'd have something by tomorrow."
"You told them we'd have something."
"I told them I'd handle it." She crossed her legs. "But I need Holland's original foundation drawings. David says she had a full structural analysis prepared before she left the site."
Before she left the site. The memory was sharp: the cold air in the Alden stair hall, the scent of plaster dust. Holland, tablet in hand, calmly detailing the micropile solution.
Laura, standing by the door, polished and silent.
He remembered Holland's expression when he'd said, 'Laura will handle the client presentation.
' Her face had gone still, her gaze holding his for a long moment before she simply nodded once and turned away.
She'd walked out. She'd gotten in her car and driven away, and she hadn't answered a single call since.
"The structural analysis is in her files," Callum said. "Get David to pull them."
"David doesn't have access to her files. She kept everything on a private server. Her personal project drive." Laura's voice stayed smooth, but the corner of her mouth tightened for a fraction of a second. "I had IT check."
"You had IT check Holland's files?"
“I’m solving the problem. That’s my job."
Callum looked at her. Laura looked back, unblinking.
There was a lipstick print on the rim of her coffee cup.
He'd memorized that shade without meaning to—coral, almost nude—from seeing it on takeout cups and on the edge of a wine glass at the Thompson dinner.
It was the color of a problem he had deliberately left unsolved.
"Your job is to manage operations. Not to go behind my wife’s back to access files she deliberately locked.”
"Your wife isn't here." Laura set the coffee down on his desk, right next to the client file that wasn't there.
"She hasn't been in this office for five days.
She's not answering calls, she's not returning emails, and she's left three active projects hanging.
The Morrisons are calling. The Alden estate is stalling.
David's crew is standing around waiting for direction that isn't coming.
" She leaned forward. "Holland made her choice.
She chose to walk away. And the longer you wait for her to come back, the worse this looks for all of us. "
"She didn't walk away. She—"
He stopped. He didn't know how to finish that sentence. She found out about the bracelet. She found out about you. She found out I've been lying to her for months and she decided to stop pouring the foundation while I kept drawing up plans for a house that was never going to get built.
He chose the words carefully. "She’s taking space. We’re working through some things."
Laura's expression didn't change, but her posture locked. Her shoulders, which had been angled toward him, squared to the desk. It was a small shift, but the air between them went cold and still.
"You're working through things," she repeated. "With Holland. While the company's biggest project in two years sits dead in the water and the Morrisons are calling to complain about me personally."
"The Morrisons—"
"I heard you on the phone, Callum. The walls aren't that thick.
" She stood up. "Elaine Morrison doesn't want me on her calls.
She wants Holland. Everyone wants Holland.
The clients, the project managers, the contractors.
They all want the woman who hasn't set foot in this office in five days and apparently has no intention of coming back. "
Callum stood too. "That's not—"
"Then tell me what it is." Laura's voice stayed level, but her eyes had gone flat in a way he recognized.
He'd seen it before, in meetings where someone challenged her authority, in negotiations where the other side came in with a number they thought she couldn't refuse.
Laura Vale did not like being told she wasn't enough.
"Tell me what the plan is. Because from where I'm standing, the plan looks like you waiting for your wife to pick up the phone while the company she abandoned starts falling apart. "
“That’s not what happened.”
"She's not here. That's the same thing."
"It's not the same thing and you know it.
" The words came out harder than he meant them to.
"You don't understand the old clients. You don't know the Morrisons or the Thompsons or any of the families Holland's been managing for years.
You can't walk into a room with Elaine Morrison and make her feel like she's been heard because you don't know her daughter's name or her husband's golf handicap or which window in the lake house, she wants to watch the sunset from.
Holland knows all of that. Holland built those relationships. You can't just step in and—"
He stopped.
Laura was looking at him with an expression he'd never seen on her face before. It wasn't anger or hurt. It was the look of someone deciding whether a piece of furniture was worth keeping—measuring him, finding the dimensions, not yet sure.
"I can’t just step in. Is that what you were going to say?”
"Laura."
"No. Finish it. Tell me exactly what I can't do that Holland can."
Callum's gaze shifted to the window, fixing on a delivery truck idling on the street below. He focused on its low rumble, a welcome weight in the silence.
Laura picked up her coffee cup. She didn't drink from it. She held it in both hands, her knuckles white against the ceramic.
"You told me she was checked out," she said.
"Months ago. You told me she didn't want the public side of the business.
You told me she was happy behind the scenes, that she didn't want the visibility.
You told me I was the one who could carry the company forward.
The one who could stand beside you at the gala and—"
"I know what I told you."
"Then why are you still waiting for her to come back?"
The question hung in the air. He became aware of the building’s ventilation, a low hum filling the space his own denial had occupied. Five days of unanswered calls, the email from her attorney—it all coalesced into a single, cold point of fact in the back of his mind.
The petition was not a dramatic threat typed in the middle of the night.
It was clean, filed, and professional, which somehow made it worse.
Holland had not begged him to choose. She had not asked him to explain.
She had taken the proof, hired the attorney, and moved the marriage into a jurisdiction where charm had no standing.