As she prepared for bed, exhaustion washed over her like a tide. A middle-of-the-night wake-up, followed by a delivery, followed by the emotional trauma of acting as a human-shield hostage for an insane man, followed by vascular surgery on one member of the US Army Special Forces and dangerously-close-to-the-heart surgery on another, had absolutely exhausted her. Her time here was nearly up. She needed to make a decision in the next two weeks about whether she intended to stay on for another six months or go back home and . . .

And what?

Reenter the life of a privileged American from a wealthy family? Go back to driving her luxury German-made car from her suburban home to her private-practice OB clinic on the correct side of the James? She’d come here to hide and heal, to escape life and all of the baggage that came with it. She’d learned, after five months, just how much life she could pack into one backpack.

When her fiancé, in an inebriated state, had arrived with another woman to a White House dinner she’d also attended, and very publicly and thoroughly destroyed her life, she’d fled to Africa instead of facing the daily mass of reporters who camped outside her home and office. Her father’s people had fought her, but in the end, she’d won. What did it matter if her father was a senator from Virginia? It didn’t affect her out in the jungle.

While she’d suffered deep humiliation and heartbreak and been in misery for months, she’d never considered death an option. Analyzing the events of the day, she felt confident that her readiness to face death didn’t have anything to do with any lingering heartbreak.

In the five months since she’d come here, she had healed, and her heartbreak had gradually diminished. The thought of her fiancé with another woman being broadcast over every possible news media no longer brought her to her knees in sorrow. Now it just caused a twinge of discomfort in her heart, making her briefly question what might be wrong with her that he would seek out the company of another woman, seek to so publicly humiliate her and laugh the entire time. When those thoughts tried to destroy her emotionally, some rational part of her brain would engage, and she would remind herself that the problem lay with him, in his heart, and not with her. Those moments of discomfort had happened less and less lately.