All Chapters of Too Late To Love Me : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

"I'll be there. Yes. I'll be there. Thursday."Dante's voice carried across the cold street, low and tight. Mira stood on the school steps with the dented box in her hands and her back to him.'Don't turn around,' she told herself.The call ended. His footsteps came across the road. They stopped at the bottom of the steps. He didn't come up."Mira."She turned.His face had gone pale. He held the phone in his hand like something hot."I promised you I'd never lie," he said. "So here it is. That was Celine. She says the doctor moved her first scan to Thursday. She says they're worried about something. She won't tell me what. She cried the whole time."Mira held the box tighter."So you're going back.""I have to." He looked up at her. "If there's a baby, and it's mine, and something's wrong, and I'm not there..." He stopped. "I can't be my father, Mira. I can't be the man who doesn't show up."She stayed at the top of the steps.Two years she had waited for him to show up. And now he w

"Madame Roux. I found it."Mira stood in the old woman's doorway at eleven o'clock on Thursday night, in her socks, holding up the small brass key.Madame Roux's eyes went from the key to Mira's face. She took off her reading glasses, folded them, and put them in the pocket of her dressing gown."Then you are ready to be angry," she said. "Come."They climbed the four flights together. Madame Roux went slowly, one hand on the rail, the other on Mira's arm. At the top she was out of breath, but she walked straight into the kitchen and stopped in front of the tall wooden cupboard beside the stove."I have dusted this door every week for five years," she said. "I never once opened it. She made me promise."Mira put the key in the lock.It turned stiffly, with a scrape of old metal. The door swung open.Inside, on three shelves, were shoeboxes and biscuit tins. Every one of them was full of letters.Hundreds of them.On the bottom shelf, by itself, sat a box made of dark cedar, polished s

"There is no Dr. Lowell, Celine."Dante said it in her doorway at nine o'clock on Friday morning. He hadn't slept. The little glossy picture from the clinic was in his coat pocket, folded once down the middle.Celine stood in the hall in a gray robe, holding a mug of ginger tea. She didn't step back to let him in."Good morning to you too," she said."The clinic was rented four weeks ago. Cash. Three-month lease. The phone on that desk isn't plugged into anything. And there's no doctor called Lowell licensed anywhere in this city."Celine's fingers tightened on the mug. Then she laughed, short and tired."You had Theo spying on me.""I had Theo read a public website.""Do you know why I went there?" Her voice rose. "Because I knew you'd do this. I knew if I went to a big hospital, you'd have someone there by lunchtime, checking my chart, calling my doctor, asking questions. I wanted one thing in this whole mess that was private. One thing that was mine." Her eyes filled. "So yes. I fo

"Because it was yours."Dante's voice came down the line low and careful, as if any wrong word might make her hang up."That's not an answer," Mira said."It's the only one I have." A pause. "You fell asleep on me. You were eleven. Your whole family was screaming your name up and down the docks, and you just held your arms up and trusted me to carry you. Nobody had ever trusted me like that. Not my father. Not anyone."Mira sat at the kitchen table with the shirt in her lap."So you kept a shirt with my spit on it."He laughed. It cracked in the middle."My mother tried to wash it three times. I took it out of the laundry basket every time.""Dante.""I know how it sounds.""No, you don't." She held the shirt against her chest. "I thought you threw everything away. Did Rosa tell you about the pink envelope?""She told me.""I found it in the trash. I sat on the kitchen floor and cried, and then I went upstairs and pretended I hadn't seen it." She swallowed. "Was that really a differen

"Mr. Russo. Miss Hart. Please sit down."Dr. Chen had a white envelope on her desk. She didn't open it yet. She folded her hands on top of it.Dante sat. Celine sat beside him, her hands in her lap, her face pale and still. Behind them, the clock on the wall ticked.On Dante's phone, face down on his knee, the live stream from Paris was still running. He had watched it all morning in the waiting room with the volume off. The sugar stairs. The tiny girl with her arms raised. Mira explaining it to the judge. Even with no sound, he knew every word.Then the screen had shown 97, and her name, and he had walked out into the corridor and called her with his hands shaking.And then Dr. Chen had opened her door."I'll be direct," Dr. Chen said. "I know that's what you'd both prefer."She opened the envelope. She slid a single sheet of paper across the desk so they could both read it.Dante's eyes went straight to the number in the middle of the page. He didn't read the words around it. He did