“It’s okay,” Jerricho said. “We have another ship picking us up in about three hours now,” he said, checking his watch.
She looked at him in surprise. “All of us?”
He nodded. “Yes, all of us.”
“Wow. I’m really happy to hear that.”
“Happy, yes,” he said, “but we’re not out of trouble yet.”
She winced. “Right. And here I was hoping that we would be.”
“Not yet,” he said, “just too many unknowns happening.”
“I got it.” She stood at the bow with him. “It’s all so beautiful and yet so treacherous.”
“This area is very much that way,” he said, “as you found out. Is somebody waiting for you?”
“No,” she said quietly.
“Will you still continue as a journalist after this?”
She glanced at him, shrugged, and said, “I’m not sure. I don’t know if I’ll even be allowed. My company wasn’t too fond of the idea of me coming here in the first place.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I’m not,” she murmured. “It seems like it’s time for a change anyway.”
“There’s a difference between times of change, … a change that is your own choice,” he said, “and a change that is forced on you.”
“In this case, it’s not likely to be forced on me as much as maybe staying home or doing more local news, so I’m not sent into war-torn areas, where I’ll be in danger.”
“And it’s possible that this has nothing to do with your job either.”
She nodded. “I’m more worried about Jessie.”
“Why? What’s wrong with her?”
She looked over and, in a low voice, said, “She’s pregnant.”
He nodded. “I’m sure that she’s not alone in this group.”
Brenna glanced around at the group of women huddled together in small groups. “That’s quite possible,” she said. “How absolutely distressing to think that those men didn’t care.”
“And I don’t even know,” he said, “whether they would have considered her condition a plus or a minus.”
“I suspect a minus,” she said.
He nodded. “Me too. Still, you’re not there anymore. It’s not an issue.”
She looked at him quietly. “You’re different.”
He looked at her in surprise and laughed. “Considering where we’re at and what we’ve just been through, it would make sense.”
“I guess,” she said, with a nod. “But it’s more than that.”
“I’m not a child or a green youth anymore,” he said. “I grew up, and life wasn’t exactly the easiest at that time.”
“No,” she said, “but you’ve obviously done really well with it.”
He looked at her and chuckled. “Young boys do grow up, if they’re given half a chance.”
“And young girls too,” she said, with a disgusted twist to her lips. “And, as I said, I’ve changed. I owe you an apology.”
“For being you?”
She laughed at that. “Yeah, I wasn’t very nice,” she said. “It took a long path through to find that out, and, once I saw it, I was pretty upset, but I made some changes, and I’ve moved on to being a better person.”
“And that’s all anybody can ask of you,” he said in surprise. “I wasn’t expecting even this conversation from you.”
“I know. I was pretty shallow back then, wasn’t I?”
“But, like you said, you’ve grown up, and I’m happy to hear that.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“Are you ready to tell me what happened?”
“Not a whole lot,” she said.
“And what happened to the marriage? Last I heard, you were getting married within forty-eight hours.”
“The marriage didn’t happen,” she said, “and that’s when the growing up did happen.”
He looked at her, with an eyebrow raised.
She hesitated and then shrugged. “Any research will probably tell you,” she said. “The internet’s full of that stuff, just to make our pain go on and on forever.” She sighed. “But I was left at the altar, and unfortunately he didn’t just quietly disappear, but he stood up and made a huge scene about what I was like as a person and how he needed to be free of the ball and chain, and he was sorry, blah, blah, blah, but there was absolutely no way in hell he would pin his life to mine.”
Jerricho stared at her in shock.
She shrugged, nodded, and said, “Yeah, you can say humiliating, but that’s too soft a description. It was unbelievably devastating. My parents were horribly embarrassed. I was too shocked to even be embarrassed at the time. But it was … it was rough.”
“Wow, that’s pretty ugly of him.”
“It was,” she said. “I became a recluse after that. I was sure that everybody was laughing at me, that I was some cosmic joke to the world, and that something was wrong with me. That, you know, nobody could love me. It didn’t take too long to see my behavior after he’d, of course, itemized everything that I had done. Apparently I had been quite the bridezilla over the whole process too,” she said sadly, “but …”
“But,” he said firmly, “nobody deserves that treatment. He could have just broken it off.”
“He could have,” she said, “but apparently that wasn’t half as much fun as watching me get annihilated by everybody around me. It was more important to him to hurt me and to show the world what I was like, rather than walk away and let me be me. The thing is, it’s what … that’s what it took for me to wake up and to become a better person.”
He stared at her, before shaking his head and looking outward.
“And yet you don’t say anything about that part.”
“I won’t say there wasn’t room for improvement because there certainly was room,” he said. “An awful lot of qualities were rough to be around.”
“Absolutely,” she said, “and I know it. At least now I do, and it’s not the easiest thing to recognize within yourself, but … I did spend a few years sorting out exactly what I would do with my life and with whom. I don’t even have a whole lot to do with my sister or my parents anymore.”
“That’s a surprise.”
“I think, since they thought I was a major failure, that I was not so much disowned but shuttered away a little bit. I actually went to the summer cottage on the lake for several months, became a recluse, while I licked my wounds.”
“And they didn’t want you to go back home again?”
“No. I think, in their minds, they thought that they’ve done everything right. I mean, I was the one who had failed, so they didn’t really want me back. Besides, it just brought up all the gossip again. They hated that I was an embarrassment to them.”
“So give it a few more years,” he said.
“Isn’t ten enough?”
He burst out laughing.