All Chapters of Too Late to Want Me Back: Chapter 61 - Chapter 68

"Come with me."Damian looked up. "To your father?""Yes.""You've done every one of these alone. Ferrero, Ruggeri, Piero on a Sunday with nobody knowing where you were.""I know.""So why this one?"The phone bill was folded in her coat pocket and she hadn't taken it out since eleven the previous night."It isn't because I think he did it," she said."Then what?""Because if the answer is bad, I don't know what I'll say to him." Her voice stayed level and her hands did not. "And I'd like somebody in the room who'll stop me saying it."Damian got his coat.Marco was at the desk with the lamp on."Both of you," he said. "That's new."Elena put the sheet down in front of him."August 1994. Your line. Outgoing calls."He put his glasses on slowly."Nine forty-one at night. The night she died. Four minutes." Elena's finger stayed off the paper. "From that phone, in this room."Marco didn't move."You've told me for thirty years that somebody rang you at eleven. That the lamp was on and yo

"Say it again.""A car at the bottom of the drive," Elena said. "Lights off. She walked down and got in and it drove away with both of them."Ruggeri didn't answer.She could hear him breathing on the line, and then something that might have been a chair."Signor Ruggeri.""Twenty-six years old," he said."What?""I wrote glass at twenty-six metres and a car facing the wrong way and I took it up the stairs myself." His voice had gone rough. "And a man behind a desk told me that a bend does what a bend does.""You were right.""I know I was right. I've known since I paced it twice." Something scraped again. "That isn't the part. The part is that I have sat in this house for thirty years being a man who might have been wrong, and I did that to myself because they wouldn't let me say it out loud.""I'm sorry.""Don't." He stopped for a second. "Get the timing done. That's what I'd do. Get the timing done and ring me back."David did the timing that night, on the kitchen table, with a roa

"You said the funeral.""The funeral was the Monday." Nella sat down carefully. "I opened the house the next morning, the Tuesday, at nine. The drive was empty.""Empty.""The car. The tape. The glass off the gravel. All of it, gone in the night."Elena sat down."You never told anybody.""Who?" Nella's hands went out. "Nobody ever asked me what was on that drive. If nobody asks you what was there, how do you tell them it isn't there any more?""You said on the phone you heard it.""I did. I was in the house.""At night?""Yes." Nella's chin came up a little. "And before you ask me why, it's nothing clever. I'd left my glasses."Damian looked up."I'd been there in the afternoon getting it ready, because the family said people might come back after the funeral. Nobody did." She smoothed the cloth. "I got home and I couldn't read the television guide and I was too proud to sit there squinting, so I got the bus back at half nine like an idiot.""What time?""I let myself in about ten pa

"Sit down, Piero.""I've asked you to go.""You have. And I'm still here." Elena hadn't moved from her chair. "Sit down."He came back from the window and sat, and he was smaller in the chair than he had been an hour ago."I moved it on the Friday.""You've said that.""I want it said again because it's the only part I'm proud of." His hands were on his knees and they weren't still. "A yard with a hole in the fence and a girl of nine in the house. I moved it. That was me and I'd do it again tomorrow.""And the Monday?""No.""You knew there was a Monday. You said the house was shut.""Because I was told the house would be shut." It came out too fast. "That's not the same thing. Somebody said to me, the place will be empty from Monday, don't go near it, and I didn't go near it. I sat at home with my wife.""Who said it to you?"Piero looked at the carpet."Signor Faranda," David said, and put his phone on the table, screen up, red dot showing. "You've seen me do this before.""Yes.""I