Her existence was hell on earth and she wanted it to end. She thought she'd read that you could live for several weeks without food, but she'd be dead much sooner if she didn't drink any of the water he offered.

She tried. She really tried.

But she was so thirsty, so, so thirsty, that when he climbed up to her cage with the bottle and the straw, she frantically drank. And for a few moments she felt better. Then she once again became aware of the unbearable hunger.

She fantasized about him getting bored with her, grabbing her dry, lifeless hair and yanking her head back until her neck snapped. Suffering over. Paradise.

He didn't. He just watched her.

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER EIGHT

Charlene was surprised by how quickly things returned to normal. It wasn't all happy thoughts, all the time—it was still ridiculously easy for her to conjure up the mental image of Lee killing himself, and it didn't help that she had to serve a lot of dishes with red sauce. (She was able to keep this observation to herself. Travis might not fire her for dumping food on a customer, but he probably couldn't employ servers who compared their food to splattered brain matter.) And she had terrible dreams every night, although they faded from her memory seconds after she woke up, leaving her with the knowledge that she'd had a horrific nightmare but no details. But she was able to live her life pretty much the way she'd done it before.

By the third day, the ringing in her ears was gone. Reporters had stopped contacting her well before that. The twenty-four hour news cycle had moved on and she was no longer of any interest. Gertie had been interviewed on local and cable news in the aftermath, but it didn't lead to anything but a few minutes of airtime. She was still a restaurant server. Customers didn't recognize her anymore. Though the police had said they might need to follow up, it was a week later and they hadn't tried to get in touch, and Charlene assumed that they wouldn't require any more of her insight.

She and Gertie were cordial to each other, and not in a phony, overly formal way. They even joked around a bit, though never about the actual incident. But they didn't hang out after work, and if Gertie did make that offer, Charlene would decline. She wasn't sure yet if she'd fabricate an obviously fake excuse or just tell Gertie point-blank that she wasn't interested.