There was only one explanation for this. He’d given the domestic immersion a go, and when the moment of truth had come, he’d decided he couldn’t have her and Rico in his life on an ongoing basis. He didn’t need them the way they both did him.
So he’d decided to walk away, thinking it the ideal time to curtail damages. Little did he know he’d been too late. Mauri was already so deeply attached she dreaded the injury the abrupt separation would cause him.
As for her, he’d damaged her eight years ago. But now...
Now he’d finished her.
* * *
On Mauri’s return, she rushed to her room to postpone the confrontation until her own upheaval had settled. But he came knocking on her door, something he never did, bounding inside, asking when Richard would be coming the next day.
Sticking hot needles into her flesh would have been easier than telling him Richard wouldn’t come at all.
Rico’s reaction gutted her.
He wasn’t upset. He was hysterical.
“He wouldn’t leave me!” he screamed. “He promised me he’d come back to tell me everything. It’s you who never wanted to tell him about me. You don’t like him and keep silent when he’s here, no matter how nice he is to you. You kept looking at him with sad eyes until you made him go away. But I won’t let him go. He’s my father and I know it and I’ll go get him back!”
“Mauri...darling, please...”
“My name is Rico!” he screamed, and tore out of her grasp.
It was mere seconds before she realized he hadn’t bolted to his room, but downstairs and out of the house. She hurtled after him, spilled outside in time to see him dart across the street. She hit the pavement the moment a car hit him.
Eleven
It was true that catastrophes happened in slow motion.
To Isabella’s racing senses, the ghastly sequence as her son flew into the trajectory of that car, the shearing dissonance of its shrieking brakes, the nauseating brunt of its unyielding metal on Rico’s resilient flesh and fragile bones was a study in macabre sluggishness. It had been like that when her father had been shot dead a foot away from her.
Then her son’s body was hurled a dozen feet in the air, with all the random violence one would toss a scrunched piece of paper in frustration. He impacted the asphalt headfirst with a hair-raisingly dull crunch, landing on his back like one of his discarded action figures. At that point, everything hit an insane fast-forward, distorting under the explosion of horror.
She hadn’t moved, not consciously, but she found herself descending on him, crashing on her knees beside him, her mind splintering.
The mother in her was babbling, blubbering, falling apart in panic. The woman whose life had been steeped in tragedy and loss looked on in fatalistic dread. The doctor stood back, centered, assessing, planning ten steps ahead.
The doctor won over, suppressing the hysterical mother under layers of training and experience and tests under fire.
From the internal cacophony and external tumult rose her mother’s voice, as horrible as it had been when her husband lay dying in her arms, shouting that they were a doctor and a nurse, and for everyone to stand back. Everything stilled as she accessed the eye of the storm inside her, examined her unconscious son as detachedly as she would any critical case.
Her hands worked in tandem with her mother’s as they zoomed through emergency measures, tilting his head, clearing his airway, checking his breathing and circulation. Then she directed her mother to stabilize his neck and spine, stem his bleeding while she assessed his neurological status. The ambulance arrived and she used all its resources and personnel as extensions to her hands and eyes in immobilizing, transferring and resuscitating Rico.
Then there was nothing more to do until they reached the practice. Nothing but call for reinforcements.
She knew she should call her partners. But the first call went to the only one she needed with her now.
Richard.
Even if he’d walked away, half of Rico remained his. Even if he’d chosen not to be Rico’s father, he’d once told her he wanted to be her ally. Only an ally of his clout would do now.
While she was a pediatric surgeon with extensive experience in trauma, this was beyond her ability alone. Rico needed a multidisciplinary approach, with a surgeon at the helm who counted neurosurgery as a top specialty. Only one surgeon with the necessary array of capabilities came to mind. Someone only Richard could bring her.
The line opened at once and a butchered moan escaped her lips.
“Richard, I need you.” This sounded wrong, was irrelevant. She tried again. “Rico needs you.”
* * *
The moment Richard felt his phone vibrate he just knew it was Isabella. Even if the look in her eyes as he’d walked away had told him he’d never hear from her again. If he was right, and it was her calling him now, then something terrible must have happened.