All Chapters of Too Late to Want Me Back: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

"Say it, then.""I don't want you back."Elena's face did something small and she turned it towards the windscreen."That's not what I mean.""Then say what you mean.""Back is the flat on Sardi and the two of us not talking about your father." Damian's hands stayed on the wheel with the engine off. "Back is me arranging things at you until you stop asking for any of them. I don't want back.""Then what?""Sunday."She looked at him."I want you to come on a Sunday. Not this one, he's asked me and that's his. Another one." His jaw moved. "And then I want to ask you again the week after, and I want you to be able to say no without it meaning anything, and I want to keep asking.""That's it.""That's it.""You gave away a controlling share in eleven seconds and you're frightened of asking me to a bus stop.""Yes," Damian said.Elena sat with it."I'm not going to answer you tonight.""I didn't ask you to.""I'm going to think about it for a week, and I might come back with something you

Traffic officer, retired."That's all it says?""That's all there's room for," the clerk said. "Two words and a rank if they've got one."Elena stood there with the folder open on the counter."Do you want the file or not? Because it's twenty minutes to bring it up.""Bring it up."But she was already looking at the name again, and it wasn't the archive it belonged to. She knew that much. It was a room with a carpet in it. It was her father's house.Marco was in the study with the lamp on."Ruggeri," she said.His head came up."Gianni Ruggeri.""Where did you get that name?""He pulled Mama's file in 2019. In person." She stayed in the doorway. "You know him."Marco put his glasses down on the desk."Yes.""How?""Elena.""That's twice this week you've said my name instead of answering me."He looked at the lamp for a long moment."He came to the house," Marco said. "Nineteen ninety-five. About a year after.""For what?""He wanted to talk to me about the road.""And?""I didn't let

"It doesn't leave the room," the clerk said. "You can take notes. Pencil, not pen.""How long have I got?""Till four."David sat down at the table with her and Elena put her hand flat on the folder."No.""Elena.""Outside.""I've read eleven thousand files. You've read maybe two hundred.""Then it'll take me longer." She didn't move her hand. "You told me to take a week off. You were sorry about it and I believed you. This is the part where you sit in the corridor."David looked at her, then picked up his coat."Four o'clock," he said.The room had six tables and nobody else in it and a strip light that buzzed.She read it twice before she started making notes.That was the first thing that unsettled her. It was easy to read. Four pages, clean, no crossings out, the sentences short and ordinary. It was the kind of document you finished without noticing you'd finished it.Vehicle left the carriageway on the bend and came to rest on the verge. Damage consistent with impact. Glass pres

"Forty-one," David said."Say it again.""Forty-one documents with Aldo Ferrero's name on them. Nineteen ninety-two to two thousand and one." He turned the laptop round. "I've been at this since six."Elena looked at the list."That's not a corrupt lawyer. That's a family lawyer.""That's the point, isn't it. Land transfers. Two wills. The lease on the Corsini building. A partnership dissolution nobody's thought about in twenty years." David scrolled. "Ninety-nine percent of this is boring.""And the other one percent?""The transfer. The insurance instruction. And this."He stopped on a scan of a single sheet."What am I looking at?""Authority to release a vehicle from police custody. Dated three days after the crash." David tapped the bottom of the screen. "That signature's been in our own archive for thirty years, Elena. It came up in the second week. I read it and I filed it under motor and I never looked at it again."Elena stared at the name at the bottom of the page."He relea

"Read it out," David said."Via delle Fontane, eleven.""That's not a yard.""I know it's not a yard." Elena had the carbon flat on the table with a lamp pulled over it. "Find out who owned it in 1994."It took David forty minutes.He came back into the room and didn't sit down."Say it.""It's yours," he said."What?""The house on Via delle Fontane was held by a Marchetti trust from 1971 until it was sold in 1998." He put the printout down. "Your grandfather bought it. Your father inherited the trust in ninety-one."Elena's hands went cold on the table edge."It was empty," David said. "That's the part I can tell you. Nobody had lived in it since eighty-nine. It was on the books as a maintenance liability.""They sent her car to our own empty house.""They sent it somewhere with a gate and no neighbours and a family name on the deed." David sat down at last. "Elena, that's not hiding a car. That's parking it.""For how long?""Nobody signed it out again. There's no scrap record, no