While still standing apart from it all was her father, Caroline noticed anxiously. He was staring at her as if a veil had been ripped from his eyes and he was seeing clearly for the first time in years. It frightened her, that look, as did the way his face seemed to be getting greyer with each passing second that went by.
‘Luiz—my father,’ she murmured, an inner sense warning her that something dire was about to happen. But even as she caught Luiz’s attention, she saw, to her horror, her father’s fingers let go of the whisky glass so it dropped with a thud to the carpet. ‘No, Daddy. No!’ she cried out as his face began to distort and his hand went up to clutch at his chest just before he began to crumple.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE rest became a blur, a cold, dark, muddy blur, where Luiz leapt from her side to catch hold of her father just before he hit the ground. The croupier-cum-waiter leapt also, and between the two of them they managed to get his limp body onto one of the sofas, while Caroline just stood there, lost in the fog of one terrifying shock too many.
I did this, she was thinking over and over. I’ve just killed my own father. She couldn’t move a single muscle, while someone else—a perfect stranger to her, though she must have met him just now amongst the confusing melee—strode briskly over to the sofa and knelt down to examine her father.
The way Luiz immediately deferred to him was telling her something she was incapable of understanding just then. But she watched as if from behind a pane of glass as the man’s long fingers checked the pulse in her father’s neck before he began quickly untying his bow tie then releasing the top few buttons to his dress shirt.
‘Vito—my bag, from my car, if you please,’ he commanded.
The man who’d jumped to her father’s aid along with Luiz now quickly left the room, and an arm came carefully around Caroline’s trembling shoulders.
It was the lady in magenta. ‘Be calm,’ she murmured gruffly. ‘My husband is a doctor. He will know what to do.’
‘H-he suffers f-from angina.’ The information literally shivered from Caroline’s paralysed throat. ‘He sh-should have pills to take in h-his pocket. Daddy!’ she cried out, as at last she broke free of her paralysis and went to go to him.
But Luiz’s aunt held her back. ‘Let Fidel do his job, child,’ she advised. Then, with a calmness that belied everything happening around her, she relayed the information Caroline had just given her to her husband, the doctor.
Luiz’s head shot round, his dark eyes lashing over Caroline as if she had just revealed some devilish secret aimed specifically to wound him. She didn’t understand. Not the accusing look, or the blistering anger that came along with it. And he was as white as a sheet—as white as her father was frighteningly grey!
The slide of pills found, the doctor quickly read the prescription printed across them. By then his bag had arrived at his side and he was demanding Luiz’s attention, instructing him to take off her father’s jacket and roll up his shirtsleeve so he could place a blood pressure pad around his arm. While Luiz was doing that, the doctor was listening to her father’s heart.
It was all very efficient, very routine to him, probably. But to Caroline it was the worst—very worst thing she had ever experienced in her entire life. She’d done this, she was thinking guiltily. She had done this to him by not insisting on breaking Luiz’s deal to him in private and in her own less brutal way.
But she hadn’t cared. Not until she had seen his face just now. She had been angry with him, and bitter, and had actually wanted to shock him into seeing what he had finally brought her to!
But what she had brought him to by far outweighed what he’d done to her.
‘He is beginning to come round,’ Luiz’s aunt murmured.
The doctor was talking quietly to him and Luiz was still squatting beside them, his dark face honed into the hardest mask Caroline had ever seen it wear. And everyone else stood about, looking and feeling helpless, while right there in the middle of a beautiful cream carpet her father’s glass still lay on its side in a pool of golden liquid.
She saw one of her father’s hands move, going up to cover his eyes. He looked old and frail and pathetically vulnerable lying there, and as her heart cracked wide open she shook herself free from the comforting arm and went to him.
‘Daddy…’ she sobbed. She felt Luiz glance at her, then grimly straighten up to make room for her to take his place beside his uncle. Her hand went out, the fingers ice-cold and trembling as they closed around her father’s then gently pulled his hand away from his eyes. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered thickly.