“No, we don’t think of it,” she said, “but those who don’t get help certainly will die. It was really hard to watch.”
“There was nothing you could do, I presume.”
“I tried,” she said simply. “It was heartbreaking to find out that what we thought had been a positive turn had ended up being too little, too late.”
“And, of course, you blame yourself.”
“It’s not that I blame myself as much as I found it hard to be so helpless. It was too late to turn things around. I was watching somebody die who seemed to have—how do I say it?—a death wish,” she said quietly.
“Although to us, on the outside, it almost seems that way.”
“It’s hard to understand the mentality, isn’t it? She was so beautiful,” she said simply. “Like seriously stunning. But she couldn’t see it. Literally all she saw was fat. She thought she was way too big, and yet she was so thin that her skin was translucent, and we saw the tissue underneath. It was just sickening.”
“How long ago?”
“Long enough that I should have dealt with it and yet not so long ago that I’ll ever forget it. In other words, eight years,” she said quietly.
He nodded. “Some things we aren’t supposed to forget,” he said, “and, at least in that way, your friend will be remembered.”
“I like that,” she said with a gentle smile.
He pointed to a vehicle off to the side where Hudson waited for them. “You ready?”
“Very,” she said. “I’m so tired and so stressed.”
“A couple days of rest will help that,” he murmured.
“I hope so,” she said, as she got into the vehicle, looked at him and asked, “So back to the safe house?”
“Yep, unless you plan on passing out on me again.”
She winced at that. “I wasn’t planning on it the first time.”
“But you did, so telling me that you’re fine now is a little suspect.”
“They pumped my stomach just in case, and they ran something through my blood to help dilute whatever it was,” she said. “And I’m feeling okay compared to before but still a little light-headed. It’s as if my mind wants to move forward but is struggling.”
“Give it time,” he said. “Some of these drugs can take forever to wear off.”
“True. Still, it is what it is,” she said.
He laughed. “I like how we always say that when there’s nothing we can do to change anything.”
“Right,” she said. They pulled up in front of the safe house, and she was quickly escorted inside. “Do you ever worry about us being followed?”
“All the time,” he said, “which is also why this vehicle will be taken out for a ride again.”
She stared at him in surprise and turned back toward the vehicle, but some other male now drove it out onto the other side of the road. “Interesting,” she murmured.
“We have to do these things to make sure the bad guys are always on their toes.” He led her up to the apartment and inside again.
She yawned, as she sagged down on the bed. “Gosh, I’m really tired.”
“You could have stayed in the hospital,” he said.
Immediately her spine stiffened, and she glared at him. “No,” she snapped. “I had enough of that place.”
“So, maybe lie down and just rest for a while,” he said.
“Are you doing anything yourself?”
“Not at the moment.”
“I didn’t get to see my mom,” she said. “That was hard.”
“We can take you back in the morning.”
“That might be better,” she said. “She won’t want to leave my father’s side.”
“No, and she also refused medical treatment herself.”
At that, she stopped, looked around, and asked, “Does she need any?”
“No way to know,” he said. “She won’t allow them to check her over.”
She frowned again. “She is kind of stubborn,” she murmured.
“And possibly hiding something?”
“In what way?” she asked.
“I don’t know, and I’m sorry to ask this, but have you considered that this trip may have been more of a last trip than a celebration trip?”
“I wondered about that,” she said. “It just added to my impetus to join them. I wasn’t planning on coming. My father didn’t want me to come either because I’m always that negative dissonance in the air, you know?”
“Deliberately?”
She nodded. “Hmm, yes, for the longest time. But now, over the last couple years, I knew it upset my mother to have that kind of conflict in the house, so I did really let some of that go. But my father knew how I felt. His opinion was that I wasn’t old enough to understand,” she said, with a roll of her eyes.
“Which really means that you don’t understand where he was coming from.”
“No, of course not,” she said. “It’s kind of hard to.”
“You were also coming from a position where you were upset, not only for your own beliefs and trust being dismissed but also because you were worried about your own mother being hurt.”
“Very much so,” she said. “I could have handled so much if he hadn’t hurt my mother so badly. I personally believe that stress and the sense of abandonment contributed to the rapid decline of her health.”
“I wonder if they ever do any studies about trauma and stress and things like the recurrence of cancer or even the first bout of cancer.”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but it’s a pretty obvious thing in many cases. I had a friend who had cancer. She beat it, and she went on to start marathon training. She was so triumphant that she beat the cancer that she actually ran a marathon, but, after she finished, only maybe three weeks later, the cancer was back.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I think that all that training was a huge stress on her body. Like maybe that in itself rendered her immune system unable to suppress it. She ended up with another reoccurrence of the cancer.”
“That would be pretty darn sad,” he said, “particularly when you think of all the unhealthy ways that people engage in to celebrate beating cancer.”
“Exactly,” she said. “But we always forget that
