All Chapters of Too Late To Love Me : Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Valarie's POVThe scream ripped through the house so sharply that for a second I thought someone had been murdered.Doors flew open all along the upstairs hallway. Osborne came out first, shirt half buttoned, hair uncombed. Caspian followed, one hand on the wall, walking with that careful limp he refused to admit was a limp. Gerald stumbled out of his room last, still rubbing his eyes. Downstairs, two maids came running up the staircase with their hands pressed to their chests.I had been drifting in the corridor near my old room, where I spent most nights now, and I got there before any of them did.Elle stood in the middle of the hallway, several feet from my door, her robe clutched at her throat. She was pointing with one shaking finger."Who is that?" she said. "Who is *that*?"I turned to look.The door to my room stood open, and a woman stood in the doorway. It took me a moment to realize I knew her. The bartender. Ari. But she looked nothing like the girl who tossed bottles and

Valarie's POVOsborne pushed back his chair and stood. He didn't say a word to anyone. He just buttoned the middle of his shirt, straightened his cuffs, and walked out of the dining room toward the front door."Osborne," Gerald said, getting up. "Wait.""Stay with her.""I should come with—""Stay with her, Gerald."Gerald stopped. He looked at Ari, then back at the hallway, and sat down again, slowly.I followed Osborne instead. I drifted down the long hallway behind him and stopped just inside the open front door, where I could see both the driveway and the dining room at once. It felt important to see both.Ari hadn't moved. She stood near the table with her arms wrapped around herself, her shoulders pulled in, her eyes on the floor. A few minutes ago she had been apologizing, trying to be polite. Now she looked like she was trying to make herself disappear into the wallpaper.I couldn't make sense of it. I had watched this woman toss bottles over her shoulder and laugh at a bar fu

Valarie's POVNobody ever said how long Ari would stay.That was the strange part. The first morning, everyone talked as if she would be gone by the weekend. By the second week, she had a toothbrush in the bathroom and a sweater draped over the back of a chair in the library, and nobody had mentioned a date. The maids had stopped calling her "the guest" and started calling her Miss Ari. Mabel, who had once left me soup on the coldest night of winter, now left a pot of tea outside Ari's door each morning without being asked.I hadn't expected that. I had expected her to be gone in a few days, a stranger passing through. Instead she was settling into the house like water finding its level.The changes in my brothers were even harder to miss.Osborne had started coming home early. For years, he had walked through the front door at nine or ten at night with his tie loosened and his phone still buzzing. Now the car pulled into the driveway at six, sometimes five-thirty, and he walked in al

Leo's POVThe restaurant was forty minutes from the house, tucked between a laundromat and a closed-down pharmacy. Six tables, a cracked linoleum floor, and a cook who didn't look up when I walked in. Ariana had chosen it for exactly those reasons. Nobody here would recognize either of us, and nobody would care what we talked about.She was already seated in the back corner, facing the door. Of course she was.I slid into the chair across from her. "You look terrible.""Thank you.""I mean it. When did you last sleep?""Sit down, Leo. You already did." She almost smiled, but it didn't last. Her eyes were red at the edges, and she hadn't touched the coffee in front of her. It had gone cold, a skin forming on the top.That was when I knew it was bad. Ariana never let coffee go cold."Okay," I said. "What's going on?"She didn't answer. She took a tablet out of her bag, woke the screen, and pushed it across the table with two fingers, like it might go off."Read it."I picked it up. A sc

Valarie's POVI had stayed in my old room that night, the way I always did, but it didn't feel like mine anymore. Ari lay in my bed, and the room had begun to smell like her, like something warm and clean, with no trace of the house I remembered.She wasn't sleeping.Hours had passed since the mansion went quiet. The last footsteps had faded, the last door had closed, and the only sound left was the tick of the old clock in the hallway. Ari rolled onto her left side, then her right. She pulled the blanket up and pushed it down. At one point she sat up entirely, pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, and let out a long breath through her teeth.*What keeps you awake?* I wondered, hovering near the foot of the bed. *You're safe here. Everyone's been kind to you.*She lay back down. A minute later, her hand slid under the mattress.I drifted closer. She pulled out a small, flat device, thin as a book and dark as a window, and woke the screen with her thumb. The light fell acros