All Chapters of Too Late To Love Me : Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

"It's a phone. It's only a phone."Theo said it at the balcony doors, out of breath, as Dante pushed through them back into the hall with Mira right behind him.Across the room, Celine stood with the officer's hand on her arm and a small black phone held up high above her head. Not her own phone. A cheap one. The one that had sent Mira six months of photographs."I have recordings!" Celine was shouting. "Every meeting! Every word he said to me in that car! I recorded all of it!" She swung toward table four. Vittorio had gone back to his seat. He sat very straight. "You want to arrest someone? Arrest him! I'll give you everything! Every word!"The officer looked at Kate Marsh. Kate gave the smallest nod."Ma'am," the officer said. "Give me the phone. You can tell us all about it at the station."Celine put the phone into his hand. Then she let him turn her around.The cuffs clicked shut. In the silent hall it sounded very loud.She turned her head as they led her toward the doors. Her

"Five minutes, Miss Beaumont. There'll be an officer at the door the whole time."Sergeant Price opened the gray door of the interview room at Brookhaven Central at nine o'clock that night and stood back.Mira walked in.The room was small and bare. A metal table bolted to the floor. Two plastic chairs. A camera in the corner of the ceiling with a little red light.Celine sat in one of the chairs.She was still wearing the pale blue dress from the gala, wrinkled now, with a gray police blanket around her shoulders. Her hair had come down. There was a dark smudge of mascara under one eye. Her hands rested on the table in front of her, on top of each other, very still.She looked up when the door opened. For one second, Mira saw her own face, tired and pale and twenty-seven years old, looking back at her.Then Celine smiled."You came," she said.Mira didn't sit down."You asked for me. Why?""Because you're the only one who'll understand." "Everyone else thinks I'm a monster. Vittorio

"Tell me what to say, Papa."Mira whispered it at seven in the morning on the second of January, sitting on the edge of her father's hospital bed. He was asleep, a tube under his nose. His big, scarred hands lay still on top of the blanket.His reading glasses sat folded on the little table by the bed, where her mother had left them. Mira picked them up. One arm was bent from forty years of being pushed up on his forehead while he kneaded.She held them in both hands."There are twelve people waiting for me," she said. "Every one of them is older than you. Every one of them thinks I'm a girl from a gossip site." She swallowed hard. "I don't know how to do this. I don't know how you did it every day."Her father didn't wake. His chest rose and fell under the blanket.Mira put the glasses in her coat pocket, next to the brass key."I'll bring them back," she told him. "Tonight. I promise."She kissed his forehead and went out."She's twenty-three. She's never run anything bigger than a

"Sit down. Both of you. You'll want to be sitting."Detective Ruth Okafor was a tall woman with gray braids pinned up tight and a coffee stain on her cuff. She pointed them into two plastic chairs in a small office at Brookhaven Central and closed the door. Kate Marsh stood in the corner with her arms folded.On the desk sat a laptop and a small black phone in a clear evidence bag. The cheap one."Miss Hart recorded eleven conversations in Vittorio Russo's car," Okafor said. "Over three months. Most of them are about the Sucre Doré reports. The money. Ardent. We'll be using all of them." She glanced at Dante. "Your father will be charged with conspiracy to commit fraud by the end of the week. His lawyers know it's coming."Dante's hands were flat on his knees. He didn't move."The man in the gray jacket," Mira said. "From the gala.""Thomas Rourke. Charged with bribery and tampering with medical evidence. He's in a cell downstairs and he's not talking. Yet." Okafor sat down and pulled

"Three hundred and twelve shops. Four days of flour."Ben Pryce read the number off his screen at seven that evening. Then he read it again, as if it might change. Around the twelfth-floor table sat Aldine, the head of the shops, and Donna, who ran the trucks.Mira stood at the head of the table with her phone in one hand and a cold coffee in the other."Four days," she repeated."After that, the shops start closing. A few on Tuesday. Most by Friday." Pryce rubbed his eyes. "Halvorsen. Brennan. Coastal. All three dropped us inside one hour. They all said the same thing. A conflict with another major customer.""I called Halvorsen's director on Friday," Aldine said. Her mouth was a thin line. "Thirty years I've known him. He promised me the renewal. Then Vittorio Russo called him this afternoon.""The Russo Group," Pryce said. "Vittorio buys more flour from those three mills than we do. He picked up the phone and told them to choose.""Can we buy from someone else?""Not that fast. Not