She couldn’t imagine being out in the desert for three or four days and still surviving. This had only been overnight and beyond that into today, for however many hours—at least from what she could determine without a watch or a window—and she was in agony. With any luck, somebody had reported her missing, and a full investigation would be done.
But she also knew that half of the people would probably consider it a good thing to have her gone. She hated to think that that’s how the world would remember her. And yet she knew that she’d stirred some people in the right way. If that’s all that she could do, then that’s all she could do.
Chapter 2
Charlotte tried to bring up Rowe’s face in her mind, to see that glimpse of the man she’d loved so much. He’d been such a different personality at the end of his illness though. The drugs had changed him and his body. He had suffered terribly from the disease and the chemo and the medications. He’d reacted almost worse to the medications. He’d finally been put into a hospice, and she’d been at his side right to the end.
Every once in a while though, he’d be attacked by his own anger at his situation, and it would hit him hard, and he’d lash out at her because she was still young and healthy. She tried to forgive him for those times, realizing it was just his circumstances talking, his own rage at his own inability to change his situation at the time.
But, when she’d walked out those hospice doors on that last day, she’d gotten into her vehicle, and she cried and cried and cried. Partly for the loss of the Rowe she knew but also partly for relief because she hadn’t thought she could make it one more day with the angry version of him.
Her own body had been right on the edge of exhaustion. Her mind and emotions had been stretched so thin, and yet to still have him berate her for being allowed to live? She knew death hit everybody differently, and the one thing she could hope for herself was that she would walk through those pearly gates kicking and screaming right to the end, so that she could enjoy every last moment.
But then, when faced with no other recourse, she’d accept that destination and take that final step forward bravely. What she really didn’t want was to turn around and blame those around her for her impending death—if she was lucky enough to have anybody around her at the end of her life. She was an orphan, having spent the latter part of her childhood and most of her teen years in foster care, hating every day of it, yet had been old enough to understand that life wouldn’t get any better unless she made it better herself.
As soon as she could, she had left the foster care system.
But something about meeting Rowe and going through everything she had with him felt like she needed a cause. Some form of action that she could take to make it seem like she was doing something. That she’d picked up her husband’s causes and that had been how she’d started but they’d quickly become her own. Watching him going through what he had … she’d been helpless to do anything but be there for him. Support him emotionally … Taking up his causes had given her a voice. She finally had to open up and to say all that she could say because, all through his illness, she hadn’t been able to tell him how she felt about his life. Her life. What their life had become. About his treatment. About the ramifications of his disease and how badly it had ravaged him.
She’d written down everything that she could in order to drain those emotions and those thoughts from her system, so she didn’t turn on him when she got up in the middle of the night and once again changed the soiled bedding for a man who held so much hatred. She never blamed him. How could she? He was just devastated by what the disease had done to his body. If anyone was more ashamed and humiliated, it’s that a man, so big and strong, had fallen down to be nothing more than an organic waste.
They both cried at times, holding each other close, and she’d wanted to rail and scream at cancer, and at this stupid man that could mean so much, and yet said so little about what was eating away at him. She’d gone through so much torment by the time of his death—both her own emotional distress and that caused by Rowe when in one of his rages—that she’d quickly buried herself in her studies, finished her education, got involved in her causes in a big way plus she started writing more as a necessity than anything because of her ever-worrying guilt.
Guilt that she could have done one more thing for him. That she should have done one more thing for him and yet hadn’t been able to or couldn’t do more because nothing more could be done. As she lay here on her back, she whispered in her mind, I’m coming, Rowe. I’m not sure how far away I am, but I’ll be there sooner than expected.
And she closed her eyes and sank back into a restless sleep, tears drying on her cheeks.
Nico double-checked the hotel’s security camera feeds but there were no recordings from that hallway leading to her room on the night Charlotte had been taken.
Now physically on her floor, he came up behind a second security camera and carefully tossed a towel up on the top, just like he did for the first camera, catching it and blocking it out
