All Chapters of Too Late To Love Me : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

"I'll walk you to your car." Mira said it at the door at two in the morning, pulling her coat on over her sweater. Her father had gone up. Her mother was washing the mugs very slowly and very loudly in the kitchen. "It's four blocks," Dante said. "I parked on Harbor Street. I didn't want to wake anyone with the engine." "Then I'll walk you four blocks." They went out into the snow. The street was white and silent. Their footsteps were the only sound. They didn't talk for the first block. On the second, Mira said, "She came to my school. Celine. Last week." "I know." His jaw tightened. "Two of your classmates filmed it. Theo sent me the clip. I'm sorry. I couldn't get out of the board meeting." "I'm glad you couldn't." Mira kicked a little snow off the curb. "If you'd been there, it would have been about you. It was about me. I told her you're a grown man with a plane ticket and two legs." He laughed, surprised. "You said that?" "In front of twenty first-years." She shrugged.

"You hired a photographer to follow my wife." Dante said it in the doorway of his father's office on the thirtieth floor. He didn't knock. He didn't close the door behind him. Out in the corridor, three secretaries stopped typing. Vittorio Russo sat behind his desk with his reading glasses on and BrookhavenBuzz open on his screen. He took off the glasses. He folded them. "Close the door, Dante." "No." Dante walked in. "Let them hear. Let the whole floor hear. You've had a man in a gray jacket follow me since the Herald. Outside a newspaper. Outside a hospital. On Harbor Street at two in the morning." His voice dropped. "And last night you sent him to take a picture of my wife." "Your ex-wife." "My wife. The papers were never filed. You know that better than anyone." A muscle jumped in his father's jaw. He stood up and walked around the desk and closed the door himself. "You're embarrassing yourself," Vittorio said. "I'm embarrassing you. That's different." "You have a child o

"Tomorrow night, at nine o'clock exactly, the lights will go down for the slideshow." Vittorio Russo said it in the back of the long black car on the evening of the twenty-seventh. The car was parked across from Sucre Doré on Market Street, where men in white jackets were carrying crates of roses in through the side door. Celine sat in the other corner with her coat open over the soft swell of her stomach and her hands folded on top of it. "Forty years of Sucre Doré," Vittorio went on. "Old photographs. The founder in her kitchen. The first shop. Music. Everyone will be looking at the screen." "And then?" "And then the screen will show something else." He held out a small silver flash drive between two fingers. "The video from your lobby. Mira Beaumont screaming at a pregnant woman. In front of three hundred people. Every reporter in the city. Every director at Sucre Doré." Celine took the drive. She turned it over in her fingers. "And where will you be?" "Table four. Close enou

"You're a home-wrecker! You know he's married!"The words boomed off the high ceiling and the marble walls. Three hundred faces turned toward the screen.Mira stood frozen by the stage.On the screen, she was thinner. Wild-eyed. Hair falling out of its clip. Her mouth twisted around words she didn't remember choosing. She was pointing a shaking finger at Celine, who stood very small against the lobby wall with both hands over her stomach.Three months ago. The Tuesday before the anniversary. A stranger's phone.The whole room was watching her at her worst.Somewhere close, a woman laughed. It was short and shocked. She cut it off.Whispers ran from table to table. Is that her? That's the Beaumont girl. The Russo wife. She looks insane.Mira's hands were ice. Her mother's fingers closed around her arm, hard.At table four, Vittorio leaned toward the man beside him and said, loud enough to carry, "Poor girl. She was never well." Then he sat back with his glass, watching the screen with

"Somebody get that man out of here."Vittorio Russo said it without raising his voice. He didn't stand. He turned his head toward the nearest security guard and lifted two fingers from the tablecloth.The guard took one step forward."Touch him," Theo said from the bar, "and I'll have twelve reporters film you doing it."The guard stopped.Kyle Brandt stood in the middle of the dance floor with both fists clenched at his sides. He was twenty-six years old. He looked about fifteen. Sweat ran down from his hairline into his borrowed collar.Kate Marsh had come up behind him. She didn't touch him. She stood at his shoulder like a wall."Go on, Kyle," she said. "You said you wanted a room full of people. You've got one."Kyle swallowed. His eyes went around the room. Three hundred faces. The screen. The roses. The man at table four."My name is Kyle Brandt," he said. "Until last month, I worked in the lab at St. Anne's Hospital. I ran the tests. Blood work. DNA." He wiped his palms on his