The police officer pulled her off me. Held her back.
Two security guards stalked up the hall behind me. “Ma’am, you shouldn’t be here.”
Hanna glared at the poor bastard who’d piped up. “Do not let her leave.”
Such a commanding voice. She had the men shaking. Me? Not so much.
I fell back on Gramps’s favorite game—gaslighting. “You need to make up your mind. Go. Stay. Which is it?”
Hanna shoved against the policeman’s arm, trying to break his hold. “Put her in jail.”
“Let’s not get ridiculous.” I sighed at her. “I didn’t do anything.”
“You kidnapped my son.”
Security and the police talked to each other. Over each other. Nurses scurried around, trying to maneuver our huddle to a quieter, less obtrusive place. All they did was hustle us down the hall, closer to Jeremy’s room.
“Ma’am, I’m going to need you to step back,” the officer said to me.
“She’s the one who’s wild.”
Hanna looked positively feral. Kicking and shoving and aching to get free. “You grabbed Jeremy and held him at your house. You drugged him.”
I didn’t care about any of this. “None of those things.”
Hanna couldn’t rein it in. She seethed. “He could have died or was that the plan?”
“I’m sure taking him out was the plan. Seems obvious someone was going for the death-by-overdose angle because his mommy lied to him about his daddy.” I shrugged. “It’s not like he could have lived in that garage forever.”
“I’m going to kill you.” Hanna lunged but the policeman still held her.
Time to move on. “Look at me, Hanna.” I held my arms out wide. “How would I drag your six-one son anywhere? He’s taller. Heavier.” And I had another point. “He wasn’t in that house, any part of it, the whole time. No way. I would have known.”
The last part was a stretch. I spent as little time as possible in the house that had swallowed up so much of my life and chomped it into tiny, useless pieces. Gabe went in and out, testing the passageways, because he thought they werecool—his word, not mine. During his escapades he somehow missed abody on the garage floor, and we’d have a talk about that, but even I’d been in the garage. The car and the kid weren’t there the morning after he disappeared.
Hanna fought against the guard’s hold. Her instinct was to attack first and talk later. Not a bad strategy. I had the same tendency. Of course she’d come out swinging. She had the most to lose, including her direct line to the deed to the Tanner family fortune.
“Someone else put Jeremy on my property to blame me.” I’d spelled out this theory for her before. Maybe she’d hear me this time.
She snorted. “Who else knew about the passageways and that spot in the garage?”
“Good question.” I mentally ran through the list on the way to the hospital. It was longer than I wanted it to be.
“If you think—”
“Ms. Sato?” a nurse called from the doorway to Jeremy’s room, cutting off whatever gem Hanna planned to launch next. “Your son’s asking for you.”
Hanna took off, as if suddenly forgetting I stood there. I followed before the gentlemen guarding the situation could grab me. They shouted and their footsteps hammered down the hall behind me, but I slipped inside the hospital room first.
Hanna sat on the edge of Jeremy’s bed. She looked over her shoulder at me. “Get out.”
“It wasn’t her.” Jeremy’s whisper cut through the chaos of storming cops and yelling nurses. The sound of his weak voice soared over the bleeping of the machines attached to him and blunted Hanna’s wrath.
Hanna froze. “What?”
He shifted on the bed, then winced. “She wasn’t the one who hit Daniela. She’s not who I saw.”
Nicely done, Jeremy.
