All Chapters of Too Late: She Is Gone With Your Baby: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Chapter 71ELII was five and three quarters.The three quarters was important and I made sure people knew about it because five on its own sounded young but five and three quarters sounded like someone who knew things, which I did. I knew a lot of things. I knew that noodles with the thin sauce were better than noodles with the thick sauce even though Jules said the thick sauce had more flavour because the slurp test did not work properly with the thick sauce and the slurp test was how you knew if a noodle was good. I knew that the third row in the wings was the best place to watch Mum play because from there you could see her face and her hands at the same time. I knew that when Mum said she was fine in the voice that went very flat and quiet, she was not fine, and the right thing to do was not ask more questions but to sit near her so she knew someone was there.I had learned a lot of things from watching.Watching was something I was good at. Better than most people knew, because

Chapter 73ARIAJulian came back to the hotel room at seven.I knew he was coming because he had sent a message in the afternoon, brief and practical, saying he would be there after Eli's dinner and that he thought we needed to talk. I had read it three times and put my phone face down and gone back to the score I had been annotating and had not absorbed a single marking for the next forty minutes.I made dinner. The ordinary kind, the kind Eli liked, pasta again because it was his current preference and because choosing a meal Eli would eat without negotiation was one less thing to manage. He ate with his usual commentary about the noodle properties of different pasta shapes, which was a new extension of his slurp test methodology, and I listened and responded and kept my attention on him the way I always did when things around us were uncertain, making the table a place that felt normal even when everything outside it did not.Julian arrived while I was clearing up.Eli looked up wh

Chapter 75JULIANThe hotel was two streets away and it took me four minutes to walk there and I spent all four of them not thinking about anything specific, which was the closest I could get to not thinking at all.The room was fine. That was the only word for it. Fine in the way of hotel rooms that had been designed by someone who understood the functional requirements of a space where a person slept and showered and stored their belongings and had not considered that a person might also need the room to feel like something. Neutral walls. A bed that was adequately sized. A window that looked out at the side of another building.I put my bag on the chair by the desk.I sat on the edge of the bed.The room was very quiet in the specific way of hotel rooms when you were in them alone, a different quiet from the one that existed when Eli was asleep through the wall and Aria was at the window, the quiet that had a presence in it, the accumulat

Chapter 77ADRIANEthan told me at eight fifteen in the morning.He did it the way he delivered most things that he anticipated would require me to sit with them for a moment, setting the information down carefully and then becoming very still, the way you set something fragile on a surface and waited to see if it would hold."Mr. Hale moved to a separate hotel last night," he said. "The Meridian Lodge. Two streets from where the orchestra is staying."I was at my desk with my first coffee of the morning and a quarterly report I had been reading without absorbing for the better part of twenty minutes. I set the coffee down."How do you know," I said."The booking was made through the agency account," Ethan said. "We have a monitoring arrangement with the city's main hospitality network for any bookings connected to the orchestra's tour account. It flagged last night."I nodded.I sat with the information.This was

Chapter 79ARIAEli asked where Jules was before he had fully woken up.That was how I knew it had been the first thing in his head when consciousness arrived, the question already formed and waiting before his eyes were properly open. He came through the connecting door at six forty with his blanket and his sideways hair and his face still carrying the soft unguarded quality of sleep, and the first thing he said, before good morning or any of the ordinary morning things, was where's Jules.I had been awake for two hours by then.I had not slept well, which was not surprising, had lain in the bed that was now entirely mine and looked at the ceiling and thought about Julian two streets away in a room I had never seen, and about the wedding coordinator's voice on the phone, and about the way Julian had looked when he said I have been doing it for five years and I do not know how to stop without removing myself entirely.I had thought about that for a long time.The removing himself part