He didn't answer immediately.
That was answer enough.
"Come inside, Elara," he said. His voice had changed — lost the warmth, gone careful in a way she'd never heard from him before.
"I'd rather stand here."
"You're going to want to sit down for this."
"Richard." She kept her voice level with everything she had. "Were you driving that car?"
He set his glass down on the hall table. He looked at it. He looked at her.
"It wasn't supposed to go that far," he said.
The same words Marcus Webb had used. The same precise, gutless sentence — as though the degree of intended harm was a meaningful distinction from what had actually occurred.
She felt sick.
"He wasn't supposed to hit his head like that," Richard continued. He was using the voice she recognized from their childhood — the one he used when he'd done something wrong and was already constructing the justification. "The plan was a broken arm. Maybe a concussion. Something that would keep him in hospital for a week, give you time to see what he was really like, how little he prioritised you when things got difficult—"
"He protected me," she said. "He threw himself in front of the car you were driving to protect me."
Richard flinched.
"And you let me spend two years thinking it was an accident," she said. "You held me while I cried. You told me I was better off. You came to Mara's apartment—" She stopped. Her voice was going to break and she would not let it break here, not in front of him. "You knew. You knew what you'd done to him. You knew what it cost me. And you said nothing."
"Elara—"
"How did you know Victoria?" she asked.
He looked at the floor.
"How long?" she pressed.
"Two years before the accident," he said. "We met at a business dinner. She approached me. She knew who I was — your brother, she said she knew you. She said Callum wasn't right for you. That she had evidence he was—" He stopped. "She told me things about him, Elara. About how he spoke about you to other people, about his intentions—"
"All of it fabricated," she said.
"I know that now."
"But you believed it then. And you decided — without asking me, without telling me, without any right whatsoever — that you would take action." She looked at her brother. "You let a woman you'd known for two years convince you to climb into a car and aim it at my husband."
"I was trying to protect you," he said, and the worst part was that she believed he believed it.
"You destroyed me," she said simply. "In the process of trying to protect me, you destroyed me. And then you watched. And you stayed quiet. And you let me rebuild from nothing while knowing exactly what you'd taken."
He had no answer for that.
There wasn't one.
— ✶ —
She left without touching him.
She sat in her car outside his house and called Garrett and gave him Richard's name in a voice that didn't shake and told him everything. Garrett was quiet for a long moment and then said, "I'll contact Detective Singh tonight," which was the name of the officer handling the broader case.
"He's my brother," she said. Not as an excuse. Just as a fact she needed to say out loud.
"I know," Garrett said. "I'm sorry."
She called Callum next.
"You were right," she said, when he answered.
A long silence. "How are you?"
"I don't know yet." She looked at Richard's lit windows. "He said he was protecting me."
Callum said nothing. He understood, she thought, that there was nothing useful to say.
"He believed her," she said. "Victoria fed him a version of you and he believed it and he— acted on it." She pressed her lips together. "I keep trying to find the line between a man who was manipulated and a man who made a choice. And I can't find it cleanly."
"There isn't a clean line," Callum said quietly. "I know something about that."
She closed her eyes.
"Come home," he said. "Don't sit outside his house. Come home."
She meant to say goodnight and drive to her own apartment.
She ended up at his.
She wasn't sure when she'd made the decision. One moment she was driving and the next she was outside Reid House — the house she'd left with a single suitcase two years ago — and Callum was opening the door before she'd finished knocking.
He didn't say anything.
He just stepped back and let her in.
She stood in the entrance hall — the same hall, the same marble floor — and looked at the walls. They were different. Victoria had repainted. New colours, new art, a complete erasure of everything Elara had chosen.
Except one thing.
In the living room, on the mantelpiece, behind a vase.
A small photograph. Beach somewhere. Both of them barefoot. Her face turned up to say something to him.
Still there.
Two years. Victoria hadn't found it.
"I kept it," Callum said quietly, from behind her. "When I found it. Even before I remembered — I kept it because I couldn't explain why I should throw it away."
She looked at the photograph for a long time.
Then she sat down on his sofa and pulled her knees to her chest like a child and for the first time in two years, in front of another person, she let herself cry.
He sat beside her and said nothing.
He didn't try to fix it.
He just stayed.