**

“What are we gonna do now?”, Shane asks, and I inhale a long breath, my eyes moving from Carmen to her, and then to Carmen again.

“I guess we need to group together all the people included in this list”, I reply quietly, folding the paper and putting in back into the yellow envelope.

“There is that ‘tick, tack’, Dante… that’s scary”, Carmen cuts in, “…What does it mean?”.

I rub my forehead feeling an exhausting fatigue running up my body.

“I don’t know what to say. When they took Cassandra and they called me, they told me straight about the bomb in your house. They told me that it was timed, they told me that it was here, they told me that I had the skills to defuse it. Of course they just wanted to be sure I obeyed their orders, that I would join you. But the bomb shows that they already knew who you are, they didn’t need me here to find out where you guys live. They just needed to…”.

“…To group us all together”, Shane murmurs.

She’s still sitting at the table, Carmen is resting on her legs, and she’s brushing absent-mindedly her back. These two are so in love that it’s touching. And I feel bad for them.

What happened one year ago was necessary. I got involved in it by accident but if I could turn back time, I would do again what I did then. It was the right thing to do. A big fatality had turned into something bigger and worse.

Carmen had lost her memory and the baby she was carrying…

…what about my baby? What about the baby my wife’s carrying?

…and Shane, consequently, had lost her mind and just wanted vengeance, she just wanted to turn the wrong things right. And she was alone in that. Nobody could really penetrate the big bubble of pain she was in. Nobody could really understand how she was feeling, nobody could really feel that longing, that fear, that anxiety, that unbearable desperation she was feeling.

Shane just did what she thought was right. Providentially, I was there to help her out, together with their, with our friends.

Whatever happens, I will never consider John James Sanders as the victim. The victim is still Shane and Carmen’s lost baby. The victims are still Carmen and Shane. The victims are Mr. and Mrs. Rossi, both dead for no reasons. The victim is Cassandra, kidnapped to become a medium of exchange.