Her gut was gripped in a tight fist. She would never be her father. She wouldn’t allow herself to let life pass her by again. Her father had been nothing more than a shadow on the doorstep of death for far too long, and he’d been dead long before she’d found him.
A heart attack brought on by alcoholism and no one had been there. She hadn’t been there. He’d died because she’d failed to do the one thing she’d been trying to do her whole life. Keep him alive.
Closing the memory down before it consumed her, Charlotte focused hard on the man before her. The living flesh of a man offering her life.
She was alive. She could live. The only person she had left to fail now was herself. And she was tired of failing.
Shaking her waist-length curls behind her back, she moved ahead of him, keeping her head high.
She was getting on board.