Footsteps(105)
The father who’d lain awake night after night watching his son, guarding him against the terrors of the dark, the father who’d stood in his kitchen with his son on his shoulder and read the note that said his mother didn’t want him, the man who’d lifted Jenny up by her neck and promised to kill her if she came near his child—that man only knew that Bina had opened her arms and let Jenny have his son.
And that man was driving the bus.
Ignoring his Uncles, heedless of all the other eyes in the room, Carlo stalked across the waiting room toward Bina. Seeing him, she stood and took a couple of steps toward him. He could see it in her hazel eyes—guilt and fear and sorrow and worry and love, everything he, too, was feeling. But he also had rage, and it was her hands that had let Trey go.
His hands got around her arms, and her fear flared in her eyes as she understood. But she didn’t try to flee his grip. Instead she whispered, pleading, “Carlo.”
“You let her take him.”
“Carlo, please. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t—I didn’t—the gun. It was on his head.” She was sobbing freely, her body trembling. “It was on his head and he was so scared, and I couldn’t think how to save him but to let him go. She was going to…she shot Joey, and she said she would shoot Trey.”
He knew all of that. He believed it all. But he kept imagining her letting his son go. He had so much fury, and all he could see was that. Bina giving Trey away. “You let her take him. You let her take him. You let her take him. YOU LET HER TAKE HIM.”
Suddenly all but deaf and blind with rage, he had a vague sense of her having become somehow blurry, and then Luca and John were dragging him across the room. His vision cleared some. Bina was on the floor. Carmen was helping her up.
Then Luca punched him in the face.
~ 22 ~
He’d shaken her so hard that her brain had seemed to bounce in her skull and her neck shrieked with pain. When Luca freed her, and he and John hauled Carlo back, Sabina couldn’t keep her feet. Dizzy, sick, and distraught, she crumpled to the floor.
Nothing that had happened to her in her life could compare to the devastation she felt now, that she had felt since Jenny had taken Trey out of her arms. This, she was not strong enough to withstand. Trey’s fear when she’d pried him loose, the way he’d looked at her over Jenny’s shoulder as she’d run to the car, Joey lying bleeding on the ground—those moments and everything since had been beyond her capacity, beyond even her comprehension.
And Carlo blamed her. Of course he blamed her. She had had charge of Trey. He had been her responsibility, and she had pried his terrified arms from around her neck and handed him to a woman with a gun.
There had to have been something she could have done differently. If she’d run back to Carmen’s cottage while she had Trey in her arms? Or if she had been more alert, perhaps she would have noticed an opportunity to get to the scant shelter of Joey’s Jeep? Something, anything that would have stopped Jenny.
Carmen squatted at her side and took her arm. “Sabina. Hon, can you get up?”
Still wracked with sobs, Sabina didn’t answer. Carmen grabbed her chin and made her look up. The movement made her neck ache. “Did he hurt you?”
Yes, but no more than she deserved. She shook her head. That hurt, too.
“Okay, come on. Get off the floor.” Carmen stood, pulling on her arm, and led her back to her feet and then into a chair. She picked up Sabina’s hand. “He’s upset. When he can calm down, he’ll know it’s not your fault. You did the right thing, Sabina. You did the only thing you could do.”
“I was to keep him safe.”
“And you did. In that situation, you did the only thing that would.”
She and Carmen had already had this talk. She’d also had it with Luca, and Uncle Ben, and Carlo Sr. None of them blamed her. The detectives and police officers who questioned her, they didn’t seem to blame her, either—though the detectives had had some pointed questions about Auberon and her association with the Pagano family. Still, they seemed to be operating on the premise that she might be a connection between the cases, not that she was responsible.
But those who mattered did blame her—Trey with his terrified eyes, reaching back for her, seeking rescue from his own mother, and Carlo, lost in sea of rage and pain. And herself. She blamed herself, too.
“Should I go? I should go. He doesn’t want me here.”