He Protected My Baby's Killer, So I Left Him novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: Brake Lights

Livia's POV

Carina looked at her mother's face for a long time.

Then something in her own gave way, and I watched it happen from the booth door.

"Yes," she said.

The word crossed the ballroom, and no one answered it.

"Since I was twenty-two," she said, in a small cracked voice that did not belong to the podium.

"Paolo got drunk at my kitchen table and cried and told me. I made him tell me twice."

"Eight years," her mother whispered.

"Eight years."

"And you let me light candles for him at Easter. You let me put his picture on the wall."

"What was I supposed to do?"

Carina's voice rose, and the sweetness went out of it.

"Take it down? Tell you he was just a boy who got in the wrong car? You looked at his picture, Mama, and you never looked at me."

"I did look at you."

"You never once said, Carina, you were eighteen, you lost your brother too. You said it to the priest."

The old woman flinched.

"Everything I had was his," Carina said.

She was crying openly now, and for once nobody could have called it a performance.

"The scholarship, the dinner, the neighbors who cooked for me, the four of them, always. And then I found out it was built on a lie that would fall if anyone said it."

"So I made sure they never said it. They owed me. They owed me every day."

I stepped out of the booth.

I had not decided to.

"Carina."

She turned her head, and her eyes found me.

"Say what you did on Atwells Avenue," I said.

She was shaking.

There were two hundred people between us and a camera pointed at her face.

I saw her try to find the old smile and fail.

"Dominic told me he was going to confess at the wedding," she said. "He sat in my kitchen and said he'd tell you and my mother and the police."

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