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“Thanks for talking to us,” one of the police officers said. She was a nice woman with dark curly hair and kind eyes, but if she’d told Gabriella her name, it was lost along with all the other details of the nightmare she was living. “We’ll keep you posted.”
Gabriella barely managed to say thank you. Her heart felt like it was shrinking into nothing, like a piece of rock in the darkest, coldest center of the earth.
Bea stood and escorted the officers out of the room, then came back to sit next to Gabriella on the bed. “Do you want me to call your doctor?” Bea asked. “She might be able to give you something to help you rest."
Gabriella shrugged away from her. “I don’t want torest. I need to find my son. I need to find Leo.”
Bea nodded. “I’ll make you some tea then. Will you be all right while I’m gone?”
“Just go,” Gabriella said.
Somewhere inside, in the last remaining coherent parts of her mind, she was aware that she was being mean to Bea, the very last person who deserved it, but she could hardly make contact with that part of her brain anymore.
“Bea!” she said before the other woman left the room.
Bea turned around. “Yes?”
“I’m… I’m sorry. I’m not myself,” Gabriella said.
Bea came back into the room and took Gabriella’s face in her hands as if she were a child. She looked into Gabriella’s eyes. “Of course you’re not, love. It’s all right. They’re going to find our boy, and I’m going to stay with you until they do.”
She kissed Gabriella’s forehead and tears leaked from Gabriella’s closed eyes.
Bea headed back for the door. “I’ll be right back with that tea.”
She closed the door behind her and Gabriella collapsed onto the bed, pulling her knees up to her chest in the fetal position. Sobs wracked her body as she imagined Leo, her Leo, out there all alone, with some criminal who would do god knew what to him.
This was her fault. Logan hated himself — even as out of her mind as she’d been when he’d told her what happened, she could see that in his eyes. Jag was miserable. Even Mauz, the behemoth of a man whose face hardly moved from one moment to the next, seemed subdued.
But Gabriella knew the truth.
She’d done this. She’d done what she always did: insisted on having things her way, insisted she knew best even when there were people around her who obviously knew better.
She’d taken the easy road of letting Leo go on the field trip instead of doing the hard thing — the right thing — and telling him he couldn’t go this time.
She thought of all the excuses she’d made to Logan — that Leo’s classmates were talking about the trip, that Leo had been waiting for months to go to the aquarium, that it was the last field trip of the school year.
None of them were worth a damn now that he was gone.
She prayed. Not the ritualistic prayers she’d learned at mass with her mother when she’d been small, but rambling, pleading prayers that god would return Leo to her safely.
She didn’t know how long she lay there before she heard a knock at the door.
She sat up quickly. Maybe there had been news of Leo. “Come in.”
Logan stepped into the room and her shoulders sagged. She knew just by looking at him that he didn’t have news.
He didn’t say anything. He just stepped into the room and closed the door behind him before walking slowly to the side of the bed.
“The police pulled security footage from the aquarium.” He hesitated. “There’s footage of the woman Mauz saw leaving the bathroom with Leo, but the cameras lost sight of them after that. They’re looking for her, and the couple for good measure.”
Gabriella had only a vague memory of Logan telling her about these people: the woman who'd seemed to be looking for something, the couple who didn’t have any children with them.
“What about the license plate?” Gabriella remembered now, remembered that Mauz had taken a picture of the license plate on the car while a man idled at the curb, waiting for the woman to return.
“Registered to an elderly man in West Town,” Logan said. “He reported it stolen this morning.”
“West Town is full of bratva…”
