All Chapters of Too Late to Want Me Back: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

cvbThe address wasn't an office.Elena stood on the corner at five to six and counted the windows twice, because the building refused to match the thing she had expected. Boarded doors. A faded green cross above the entrance. The clinic printed on the header of her own scan.Damian's car sat two streets back where she had told it to sit. She walked the last stretch alone, one hand flat on her stomach.The door was unlocked.Inside, the lights were on and the radiators were ticking. Alexander sat at a folding table with two cups already poured."Sit down before you say anything," he said. "How's your blood pressure?""You don't get to ask me that.""It's a fair question at twenty-six weeks." He pushed a cup across the table. "Sit. The chair's clean, I checked it myself."She sat. She didn't touch the tea.There was a file open in front of him. Old paper, soft at the corners, nothing like the crisp scan he had sent her at midnight."You didn't hack my clinic," she said."No.""Then ho

Damian counted four minutes on the archive clock before he moved.The transfer document lay flat under his left hand. The death certificate sat under his right. He read the dates again. Then again. The signature on the transfer had been made on the eleventh of March. His mother had been buried on the twenty-sixth of February.Two weeks. She had signed away twenty percent of Marchetti Group two weeks after they put her in the ground.The door pushed open behind him."You've been down here since ten," Elena said. "The lights are off upstairs."He didn't turn."Damian.""Come here."She came. He still didn't hand her the papers."Before you look," he said, "I want you to answer something.""Ask.""If this is what I think it is, the twenty percent doesn't go to your father. It doesn't go to the company. It goes to me." He finally looked up at her. "Do you want to know badly enough to lose it?"Her jaw moved once. She took out her phone."David," she said into it. "Wake up. Get to the arch

Damian dragged the book under the desk lamp and held it there."That's my D," he said. "That's the way I close the loop. I've signed like that since I was nineteen.""Sir.""The second N doesn't finish. It never finishes. Look at it.""Damian.""It's mine, Elena."Elena didn't look at the book. She looked at the nurse."Have you ever seen his face?"The nurse opened her mouth, then stopped."Have you?""He comes at seven," she said slowly. "Before the shift change.""Before the shift change.""There's one person on the desk then. Usually me." A pause. "He's polite. He signs, he goes up, he comes down.""And you've never once looked at him properly."The nurse didn't answer.Elena leaned on the counter. "I want to see the resident.""I can't. Not without family authorisation.""Then check the file."The nurse checked. She scrolled. She stopped scrolling and read the same line twice, the way people do when a screen has stopped making sense."Next of kin is already on record," she said.

"I came alone," Damian said. "Now answer me.""Luca.""Luca what?"The young man looked down at his own hands for a moment."Just Luca."He said it without any weight, the way a person says something they stopped minding a long time ago."I'm not a Marchetti."He sat back down on the step, as if standing had cost him something."I'm not a Vale either. I've never told anyone I was.""Somebody put a name on a list.""Not me. That name was there before I was."Damian stayed standing. "Explain that.""They raised me at the clinic. There were three of us then, two nurses and a cook and a woman who taught us reading in the afternoons." Luca shrugged. "School was paid for. All of it, right through, by Mr Cross. I've met him four times in my life.""Four.""Four. He asks how I'm doing, he doesn't wait for the answer, and he leaves." Luca looked up. "That's the whole of my childhood in two lines.""And her?""I started visiting when I was eleven. On the bus, on my own, once a month.""Eleven."

She was on the second bench, facing the old house, and Luca was beside her with her coat folded across his arm."She won't wear it," he said. "I've asked four times.""I'm not cold," the woman said.Damian stopped a step short of the bench.She turned her head and looked at him.It went on long enough that Luca shifted his feet. She didn't blink and she didn't hurry, and her hands stayed still in her lap the whole time."Damian," she said.He couldn't answer.She said it again, softer, the way people say a word they have said out loud alone in a room, many times, with nobody there to hear whether they got it right."Sit down," she said. "You're too tall standing there."He sat."You've got his hands," she said. "Not your father's. His.""Whose?""My brother's. He died before you were born." A small movement of her shoulder. "Nobody ever tells you which parts of you came from people you never met."Elena stayed back by the path and didn't come closer."They told me you were dead," Dami