Too Late: She Is Gone With Your Baby의 모든 챕터: 챕터 121 - 챕터 130

Chapter 122ELIThe kitchen smelled like eggs when I woke up, the good kind, the kind that meant someone had actually tried, and I lay in the unfamiliar bed for a minute deciding whether trying counted for anything.I decided it did not.I got dressed by myself, the way I always did, and I found Mum already awake in the little sitting room part of our wing, and we walked down together to where the smell was coming from, and I brought my notebook with me even though I was not planning to write in it.I just wanted it there.The kitchen was big. Bigger than any kitchen I had ever eaten breakfast in, with a table that could have fit ten people even though it was only going to be three of us, and Adrian was standing near the counter instead of sitting, which I noticed right away because grown-ups do not usually stand around waiting like that unless they are nervous about something.He was nervous about me.I decided I liked that he was ner

Chapter 124ELIStory time was about a fox who lost his way home, and I did not hear a single word of it.I was looking at the wall instead. Not at anything on the wall, just the wall itself, the particular pale yellow of it, and I was thinking about the hospital, and about Jules lying there with his ribs broken, and about how many days it had been since I actually saw his face instead of just hearing his voice on Mum's phone.I had brought my notebook.I was not allowed to bring it during lessons. That was a rule, one of the school rules, notebooks and toys stay in your bag during story time, and I had never once broken that rule before, not one single time in the whole time I had gone to this school. I broke it that morning. I kept the notebook tucked under my arm, against my ribs, the whole time, and nobody noticed because I was quiet, and quiet children do not get checked on the same way loud ones do.My teacher noticed something, though. I saw her

Chapter 126ARIARehearsals had ended.There was nothing strange about that on its own — every tour reached this stretch eventually, the days between the last full run and the performance itself, when the orchestra was as ready as it was going to get and the only thing left to do was wait for the hall to open its doors. I had lived through this stretch a hundred times before. I had always found a way to fill it, teaching, notes, small corrections, the endless fine-tuning that made a musician feel useful even when the real work was already finished.This time the emptiness felt different.There was no music to disappear into during the day. There was only the house, curated and quiet, and the tension that lived in every room of it, and my own thoughts, circling, circling, with nothing to interrupt them.  I had not understood, until now, how much the music had been holding together for me.  

Chapter 128. A Mirror.VIVIANThe elevator doors had not been fast enough. I heard every word of it. The boss and his dead wife's double. I heard it, and I watched Aria's face hear it, in the last inch of space before the steel slid shut between us.Ava said nothing on the way down. I said nothing either. My hands were shaking, so I pressed them flat against my dress until they stopped. The wardrobe room off the set was empty. There was no acks of clothes. In the room a mirror ringed with bulbs. A chair nobody had sat in yet was at the corner. I walked in and I refused to sit."Vivian," Ava said behind me."Give me a minute.""They're waiting for you on set.""Then they can wait."I looked at myself, in the mirror calmly. My hair was perfect. My makeup perfect. The face of the Hart campaign for three years running, smiling from billboards across the city. And three floors up, someone in this company was laughing about a woman who had almost died on a street four nights ago."You'r

Chapter 130. Dead RingerARIAI didn't wait for the car. The driver had said ten minutes. I couldn't stand still for ten minutes. At least not in that lobby. The receptionist looked at me pretentiously. me. And the marble floor making every footstep sound like an announcement.So I walked. The air outside was cold and sharp. It hit my face and I breathed it in like it could wash something out of me.It didn't. The boss and his dead wife's double. I heard it again. And again. Every few steps, like a song stuck on the wrong bar.Double.... Not Aria. Not even Elena. Just double. A copy. Something that looked like the real thing from far enough away. My jaw tightened. I walked faster.For weeks, I had built a careful little wall inside my head. On one side was me. Aria. A woman who had lost her memory and was trying, slowly and honestly, to understand where she came from. Curious. Careful. In control of her own questions.On the other side was the thing I had refused to look at. The ide