Especially when one of the last memories I have of us making love is fromthatnight, when Carter called me to the townhouse, when she finally broke down and I had to be strong for her, holding her, trying to love the grief from her soul, letting her use my body in a different way than usual, trying to be the one to pull her soul back together when she spent so many years being the one to tie my loose parts in place.
She gave me a ring that I wear on my left ring finger. It doesn’t look like a wedding band, but that’s what it is, to me. Just like the ring I wear on my right finger is a wedding band from Carter. The ring she gave me is black with silver Celtic knots scrolling around it.
Inside, it simply says,MINE.
I hope she understands how much I love her.
I hope, if I end up giving up and leaving office early, that she forgives me, wherever she is.
I hope, despite his own grief, that Carter is strong enough to keep me living, because, honestly?
I really don’t want to.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Susa
Sarah is seventy-two on the night of day eleven, when I watch her slip off her life jacket, remove her rings and necklace, and carefully ease herself through one of the cutouts where the boarding ladders are located. It’s the cutout closest to where I’m sitting.
I’m the only other one awake. I’ve started trying to sleep during the days, under a mylar blanket, for what little shade it gives me, and staying up at night. It helps me not feel as thirsty—or miserably sick to my stomach—and I usually take a night watch. It also allows me to sneak sips of water. I’m down to four bottles in my purse. I’ve been sharing with Connie and George, swapping out bottles of rain water with bottles of fresh water. I don’t know if they’ve caught on or not. If they have, they don’t say anything.
We’ve been lucky that intermittent rains allow us to capture enough salt-tinged rain water in the mylar blankets to refill our bottles, but our luck will eventually run out. We are careful to only drink a full bottle each when we have enough collected in a blanket to refill them, and all the empties are full.
When we don’t have rain, we only sip.
Sarah’s husband was the lieutenant governor of South Carolina. She revealed to us yesterday that they’d diagnosed her with pancreatic cancer a month ago. Inoperable.
They hadn’t even told their kids yet.
She’d remained mostly quiet throughout our ordeal, but yesterday she became a damned chatterbox. I didn’t understand, at the time, why she was telling us all this now, but she started talking, and talking.
Andtalking.
This was going to be a sort of bucket-list trip for her and her husband, and she wasn’t going to get treatment for her cancer. She was going to keep going until she couldn’t go any longer. Once his term was up, he was going to retire from public life and spend the time with her. She refused to let him retire early.
We don’t know if her husband made it or not. He shoved her out the starboard aft exit and disappeared back into the cabin to try to help someone else from their group who’d fallen in the center aisle.
She never saw him again.
He couldn’t swim, and he wasn’t wearing a life vest. He put the one from under his seat on her, because her seat didn’t have one.
Ooooh, fucking Yelp, you just wait.
We’ve all had to answer the call of nature, although rarely now, because we’re barely drinking and not eating, obviously. So I don’t think much of what she’s doing, at first, until I actually process that she’s removed her jewelry and life jacket.
Sarah realizes I’m awake when I sit up. She pauses and meets my gaze, gives me a sad smile, and then disappears into the water. When I get up to look, I see her floating on her back, a peaceful smile on her face as she pushes away from the raft. She waves good-bye to me.
I’m going to call out to her, or at least raise an alarm, when I hear a voice behind me.
“Let her go,” George whispers.
I turn and see he hasn’t moved from where he was sitting next to me, but his eyes are barely open. We’re all sunburned and squinting and having problems with our skin cracking, drying out. The men, including George, are all sporting scruffy beards now.
I probably look like a wookie.
“But—”
He shakes his head. “Let her go.”
