All Chapters of Too Late To Beg: Chapter 111 - Chapter 115

BRIDGET Two weeks. Two weeks without a single word from James Whitmore. I had made myself at home in his villa. I had slept in his bed. I had used his kitchen and his staff and his swimming pool. I had sat at the head of his dining table every evening and eaten meals that his cook had prepared, and I had told myself that this was only the beginning. That when he came back, he would come back to me. That the anger he had expressed the morning after the divorce would soften, the way men's anger always softened. But two weeks was a very long time to wait. On the fourteenth day, I paid someone to find out where he was. The photograph that came back to me two days later stopped me cold. A girl. A young girl in what appeared to be a private hospital room. James was sitting on the edge of her bed. His hand was over hers. He was looking at her face with an expression I had seen on him exactly once before. He had looked at Tamsin that way. I sat at James's dining table with the photo

TAMSIN I had been pacing the hospital corridor for forty minutes. Poppy had told me, twice, to sit down. I had sat down both times, held it for approximately ninety seconds, and then risen and resumed pacing. The corridor was long enough that I could cover a decent distance before I had to turn around, and the turning around gave me something to do with my body while my mind refused to settle. Whitney was sitting in one of the corridor chairs with her legs crossed and her hands folded neatly in her lap, watching me with the expression of a woman who had decided that intervention was futile and observation was more interesting. "You are going to wear a groove in the floor," she said. "Let her," Poppy said, from the chair beside her. "It is keeping her from doing something worse." "What could be worse than this?" "The last time she got news in a hospital, she nearly had a surgical procedure she was going to regret for the rest of her life." Whitney conceded this with a small no

TAMSIN Six months after my own wedding, I stood at the back of an exquisite garden terrace and watched my sister marry the man who had loved her quietly for most of his adult life, and I cried so hard that Leo had to produce three consecutive handkerchiefs from his jacket pocket. He had come prepared. He had, in fact, spent the morning preparing. I had watched him fold four handkerchiefs and distribute them across the inside pockets of his suit with the methodical foresight of a man who had been married to me for six months and had learned certain things about my relationship with significant occasions. I had told him four was excessive. He had said nothing, only raised an eyebrow, and tucked the fourth one in anyway. He had been right. I was enormous. There was no other word for it. I was more than eight months pregnant with a boy who seemed to have decided, somewhere around the sixth month, that he required significantly more space than the average human infant. My st