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It wasn’t easy.
Gamble rolled to his back.
“I’m not strong enough, Elizabeth. I survived a lot, but I can’t survive this.”
“I’m sorry for what happened. I wish I could go back and change it. I really do. Only, we can’t Gamble. Storm wasn’t in the right frame of mind, and you didn’t know. She didn’t tell anyone.”
“There were no signs. I wouldn’t have left. I would have stayed.”
She was aware.
Elizabeth helped him sit up, and propped pillows behind his body so he was upright. What had once been a strong man was now a shell of a human being.
At the knock on the door, she headed there. When she opened it, it was Jagger.
“Need help?” he asked.
She nodded.
This was a battle she wasn’t quite sure how to win. She’d lost people she loved, and had regrets, but she’d never lost a husband or child.
“Yes, please.”
The two of them went in, and they flanked him on the bed. Elizabeth grabbed the sandwich from the table and rested it on his legs.
“I’m not hungry,” he said.
That was neither here nor there.
He was dying.
Gamble was starving himself to death.
“You have to eat,” Jagger said.
He was honest.
“I don’t want to eat. I want to be with my family,” he whispered. “I want to be with my wife and daughter.”
God.
They were going to lose him.
Elizabeth knew they had to do something. He was shriveling up to nothing. Gamble was dying little by little. If they got one meal in him a day, it was a miracle.
His clothing hung on him, and his face was gaunt.
“I know how you feel,” Jagger said. “When I lost Roxy and I thought my daughter was dead, it was torture.”
Gamble looked over at him.
“Then, when I thought Maura was blown up, and our child with her, I was so empty that I didn’t think I could ever fill up again.”
“She left me intentionally,” he whispered.
Jagger was honest.
“Gamble, she was broken. You used all of you to fill the holes in her, but Storm had been held in captivity for a long time, raped, and abused. She was not able to hold it together. She wasn’t aware of what she was doing.”
