She wasmine.
Part of me wonders if dying isn’t a bad idea after all, then I remember my kids. I can’t leave them when I have a chance to return to them. I…can’t. Ellen would never forgive me.
Exceptwith every day that passes, our survival is far less certain. Surely they think we’re dead now. Everyone probably thinks we’re dead.
Hell, Lisa, one of the people who lived this long, died after we made it this far because she ended up drinking sea water despite my best efforts to drag her out of the surf. Nine of us made it safely into the life raft.
There’s only five of us left now—me, Susa,her friend and fellow Floridian, Connie, Allen, and Collin. Susa’s the youngest, and Connie also lost her husband. They were sitting in the row behind me and Ellen, Connie’s husband on the window in the seat directly behind Ellen.
He died at the same time Ellen did.
I hope that, if I’m wrong and it turns out there is any sort of afterlife, maybe they met up and travelled there together so neitheris alone.
Connie, however, despite being much older than myself and Susa, is in far better condition than Susa. Susa suffered violent nausea from being seasick while in the raft and barely kept down any water. Now that we’re on “land,” we’re killing crabs every night and eating them raw. That’s helping the rest of us, but Susa can barely manage to keep water down now, much less raw crab.
Allenand Collin are both older than me, too. At thirty-nine, Susa is five years younger than my forty-four.
If it wasn’t for the kids, I would’ve killed myself already. Just slit my wrists with the tiny souvenir penknife Susa and I scrounged off Pat’s body before we rolled him out of the life raft and into the water.
I meant it was a souvenir he’d purchased for himself, not a souvenir for me andSusa for—oh, you know what I mean.
Ellen would probably be amused by that, if she was here.
I know if Case was here, I’d have her cackling.
That makes me want to cry, though, so I suck in a deep lungful of salty air and stare out at the horizon.
We have a flare gun we haven’t even used yet. We didn’t want to waste our precious few flares. We haven’t seen or heard any planes or ships.
Nothing.
It’s like we dropped off the face of the planet.
Maybe we did.
Maybe there is an afterlife, and this is Hell. Maybe, somewhere, Ellen is alive and safe and already reunited with our kids, and I’m the one…lost.
I wish that was true, because, honestly? It’d be a comfort to know she’s okay.
Except that’s dehydration and starvation and exhaustion and grief talking. I know it is.
Susa’s been talkinga lot today, too, and don’t think I don’t understand why. She’s convinced she’s going to die.
I think we all are convinced of that, to a certain extent. It’s day twenty of our ordeal, and we’re nearly out of water despite our best attempts to ration and collect it.
She’s talking, telling me things to pass on to her two men, Carter her husband, and Owen. Owen is the governor of Florida. He’snot just her friend and boss, he’s also beenherssince college.
And Carter’s.
The way Ellen wasmine, it turns out.
As she softly confesses the truth, I realize we have far more in common than I first realized, and it makes me even more determined to take care of her to the best of my ability.
To return the girl to her men. Especially to her Master, Carter.
She asks about Ellen’s necklace,recognizing it was Ellen’s day collar.
I make her take sips of water, retreating to the mental safety of slipping into “Dom mode” with her.
