All Chapters of In Love With The Dangerous Professor: Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

Celine's POVThe call came on a Tuesday morning when Victor was having breakfast and Grace was braiding Hope’s hair at the kitchen table of Chen’s small house it was no more than that, though trucked in by Kalashnikoved men from the good side of town which she had arranged for us outside Auckland, the three of them doing what ordinary thing they had returned to in those first two weeks after watching every door.I went out to the back porch to answer it.Caelum’s voice was tired in a way I had never heard before, a tiredness that rested below everything else instead of on top of it. The kind that stemmed from the end of something instead of its center."It is over," he said. "Sarah is in custody. Chen's people have been sweeping into the coalition leadership for three days, and most of them are in custody or fleeing. “The people who are running, they’re not running toward something. They’re running away from us.”The New Zealand morning hung around me green and wet and utterly uninter

Celine's POVSo I read the book in a single sitting one Wednesday morning when there was no one else at home.I’d learned about it the night before, a message from the foundation’s communications director, her tone careful in that way it got when several something had come and she did not want to be the one to tell me about. I saw it online before I saw it in print and I sat at the kitchen table and read it from the first page to the last, and when I finished, I closed the laptop and sat in silence for a long time.It was well written. That was the thing hardest to explain to people later, that the worst thing about it was not that it contained lies but that it wasn’t exactly lies. It took the actual things, the actual things, and arranged them in a sequence and a light so perfect that all that came after looked like performance, all but Caelum’s history. Like strategy. Like a man who had discovered that redemption made for a far more lucrative public role than crime and had built one

Celine's POVHe told me everything.He sat at the kitchen table and he told me everything, from when the figure turned and he recognized who it was through the conversation and then the shooting and flash drive and kiss on the cheek to door in back of warehouse. And he told it in the flat sequential way that he told things where he had lost something, all the facts in order, the feeling beneath them there but not performed.I sat by him and I listened to the whole thing and when he finished I did not speak for a moment.So I said, “Your dead fiancé has been alive all along and watching us."Yes.""She orchestrated all of it. The book. The foundation's money. The smear campaign.""Yes."“And then she got inside a warehouse and forgave you, handed you a flash drive.”"Yes."I looked at the table. “I looked down at the flash drive resting on the table between us, where he had set it down when he walked in a small unremarkable thing that was anything but.’I tried to pin down what I was f

Celine's POVTen minutes.I’d played this out enough in my head that when the call came it wasn’t a question of what to do but rather how fast. I was off the phone and walking before Caelum’s voice had completely trailed off and I was in the hall calling for the kids before I truly thought through how that would go.Hope was the first to show up at her bedroom door. She looked at my face and reached for her shoes.Grace emerged from her room with a sketchbook, the instinct of someone who had learned to reach for a sketchbook whenever things went wrong, and I didn’t tell her to leave it.Victor ran down the stairs in his socks and with his baseball cap turned around backwards, wearing the alert look of a kid who had been raised around so many of these moments he knew them for what they were."Mom." Hope's voice was controlled. "What is happening?"“Your grandmother is coming for you,” I said. I was drawing the emergency bag from the hall cupboard as I spoke, the one that had been there

Celine's POVThe safe house Chen had arranged was tidy and secure and utterly intolerable.I sat in it for two days. I sat in it and watched my phone and I talked to Chen when she called with updates that were careful and incomplete like all those updates you get from someone who doesn’t quite yet have the information they are trying to find. I drank coffee I could not taste and I slept in short stints that were not truly sleep and I watched Maddie watch me with the look of someone trying to figure out what kind of help was needed and whether or not I was going to allow it.She stayed. That was what she did. She was there and she cooked food that would appear on the table and stayed with me when I wanted company and left me alone when I needed that and never pretended any of it was okay.“He’ll get them back,” she said the second morning. "He always does."“He’s never had to retrieve them from her,” I said. “He’s never had to retrieve them from somebody who’s not trying to harm them.