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Back Jungle Up Save as PDF
Chapters (63)
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  63. Author’s Note

Gina turned and glanced at Thomas. She knew he must be thinking about his sister. Gina had met Lacy during the same tumultuous period in South Africa that she’d met Thomas. She’d felt an instant kinship with Lacy, who remained stoic and even sarcastic in the face of death.

Two months later, Gina had accompanied Thomas to Lacy’s wedding in France, and it was only then that Gina learned Lacy had multiple sclerosis.

Though no one but Thomas was aware, Lacy had been suffering a flare-up during her nuptials. She hadn’t been able to take her medication for the three days she’d been held hostage on a cruise ship, and Lacy was in the midst of a months-long relapse.

MS is an autoimmune disease that affects the central nervous system. The body attacks the myelin sheath (sleeves of fatty tissue that protect your nerve cells), causing disruption of the flow of information between the brain and the body. The symptoms of MS vary from person to person; for some it will be numbness in one of their extremities, for others it’s their coordination that suffers, for others it’s memory problems. For Lacy Prescott, most often it was her vision. When Thomas was walking Lacy down the aisle, she was seeing double.

Back in Seattle, after Lacy’s wedding, Gina could see how much Lacy’s MS affected Thomas. When Lacy was in the midst of a flare, Thomas wasn’t the same, his mind preoccupied with his sister six thousand miles away. He described her disease as a constant splinter in his heel, and in a rare moment of vulnerability, Thomas confessed that the day Lacy was diagnosed with MS—her junior year of college—had been harder for him than the day he’d lost both his parents.

Gina stroked Thomas’s arm with her hand.

He turned and gazed at her. His hair was longer than it had been when they dated, and there were a few wayward strands of gray. He had two weeks of light-brown stubble, dark circles under his eyes, and a gauntness in his cheeks. He looked exhausted; his gray-blue eyes, which had always mesmerized her, swam in a soft sea of pink.

Gina still couldn’t believe he was here. It had been two years since she’d seen him. Two years since she’d told him she was moving back to Bolivia.

It was the biggest regret of her life.

Could he forgive her? Had he already? Was that why he was here? Or was he only here out of a sense of duty?