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He rose, in an agony worse than when multiple bullets had torn through his flesh, looked down into Isabella’s searching gaze and dealt himself a fatal injury. That of saying goodbye. Forever this time.
“Actually, I think you were right not to want me near your family. I’m glad that interruption stopped me from making an irretrievable statement, gave me time to realize it’s not in Rico’s best interests to have me in his life. Nor is it in Rose’s and her family’s. I’m sorry I forced myself into your lives and disrupted your peace, but I promise to leave all of you alone from now on. Once you tell Mauricio I’m not his father, he’ll reconsider being called Rico, and there won’t be any irreversible damage when I disappear from his life.”
* * *
Shocked to her core, Isabella watched Richard walk away, feeling as if he was drawing her life force out with him.
Then the front door clicked shut behind him and everything holding her up snapped. She collapsed on the couch in an enervated mass.
She’d thought he’d be delighted with her blessing, had been about to follow it with a carte blanche of herself, if he’d consider her as a lover again.
She’d been ready with assurances that whether or not it worked out between them, it wouldn’t impact the lifelong relationship she’d been sure he’d wanted with his son. The worst she’d thought would happen was his rejection of her, had been prepared to put up with anything, even watching him find love with another woman, so Rico would have his father, and she’d have him in her life at all.
She hadn’t even factored in the possibility that within hours he’d decide he didn’t want Rico, either.
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.
