All Chapters of Too Late to Want Me Back: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Nobody had left the room.Twelve people at a board table, pens down, and Luca standing in the doorway with a coat on the floor at his feet."Ask me," Damian said."Not here.""Here."Luca's mouth moved twice before anything came out of it."On the steps," he said. "When I asked you to say the name in the book. You went quiet after.""I did.""What were you not saying?"The room made no sound at all.Damian could have taken him outside. He could have crossed the floor, put a hand on his arm, walked him into a corridor and said it in a low voice like a decent man.He didn't, because a thing said quietly always sounds like a thing being hidden, and this boy had been handed enough of those."Same mother," Damian said. His voice barely moved."you're my brother".Somebody at the far end of the table breathed out.Luca didn't move."Say it properly.""Same mother. Her." Damian nodded down the table. "I worked it out on the steps and I said nothing, and then I went home and said nothing, and

"He told me which side of the car it was.""Sit down.""I'm fine.""Elena."She sat on the arm of the chair, which wasn't sitting, and put her hands flat on her knees."He said that bend always takes the left side. Every claim off that road, driver's door, left side.""And?""She was hit on the right."Damian didn't move."There's nothing in any report about which side," she said. "David's read all of it. I've read all of it. It isn't there, Damian, it was never written down, so there's only one way a man sits in a cardigan on a Sunday and knows it."Her voice held all the way to the end of the sentence.Then it stopped working.She put her hand over her mouth and made no sound at all, and her shoulders went and she couldn't get them back.Damian crossed the room.He didn't reach for a phone. He didn't say they'd file something in the morning. He didn't tell her what it proved or what came next or that she should eat.He sat down on the floor next to the chair, and he stayed there.It

He opened the door in the same cardigan."Elena. Twice in a week.""This is David Reyes. He's my lawyer.""Bring him in, bring him in." He was already turning for the kitchen. "I'll put the pot on.""Don't."He stopped."No coffee this time," Elena said. "And I'm recording."She set the phone on the table between them, screen up, red dot showing.He looked at it the way you'd look at a cat that had got in through a window."That's a bit formal for a Sunday.""Sit down."He sat.David put the file on the table and Elena opened it at the page she had marked."The crash report," she said. "All of it. Attending officer, insurer's assessment, the engineer's note. Read as much as you like.""I've read it before.""Then show me where it says which side of the car was struck."His hands stayed on his knees."Take your time.""Elena.""Which page?""It isn't in there," he said."No. It isn't in anything. It isn't in the police file, it isn't in the payout, it isn't in the engineer's note." Her

Alexander stopped four feet from him and didn't come any closer.Damian came down the steps and stopped at the bottom of them, which was as far as he was going to go."Say it out here," Luca said. "Not inside. Not in an office.""Here is fine.""They all know, don't they. Every one of them knows and I'm the last.""Yes.""Then say it."Alexander looked at him for a moment."I'm your father."Nothing moved on the whole street."I didn't marry your mother and I never lived with her, and I've never once in all these years been in a room where I could say that sentence." He didn't soften a word of it. "I'm not going to ask you for anything and I'm not going to explain myself, because there isn't an explanation that survives being said out loud to your face."Luca stood very still."All right," he said."All right?""I've got questions. Small ones. Answer them the way you answered that.""Go on.""I was six. I had a chest thing and I was eleven days in the little hospital on Via Serra." Lu

"There's a bench," she said."I know where the bench is.""Then walk to it, Marco. I'm not standing at a gate at my age."He came through and neither of them said anything about the fact that he'd come through.They sat down. He put his hat on his knee."I'm not going to explain myself," he said."I know. That's why I let you in.""I've had thirty years to put it into an order that sounds better and it doesn't get better.""No.""If I start, you'll listen, because you were always polite. And then we'll both have to sit through it.""So don't start."He turned the hat around by the brim."What would you like me to say?""Something ordinary," she said. "Anything ordinary. I've had nothing ordinary since 1994."He looked at her."Do you still take sugar?""Two.""You took two before.""I take two now. What else."He thought about it."I had a dog," he said. "For eleven years. A grey thing, bad-tempered, he'd only sit with me.""What was his name?""Nico.""Is he dead?""Six years ago.""