Jack had been ecstatic that she was in America. His college was in San Diego and it was just a short plane ride from there to Los Angeles.
He would turn up at the apartment her new boss had rented for her especially at the weekend and with gentle and persistent persuasion ask her to have dinner with him. She could not refuse. She had no excuse to offer anyway. She licked away her terrible pain, slowly learning to face the world with a facade of cool amusement that betrayed nothing of her inner pain, thoughts and feelings.
Jack was good company. He helped to bring her out of herself. She did not allow him to kiss her again though. She kept him at a very safe distance, making it clear that she did not want a romantic involvement until one night, out of the blue, he proposed to her.
The proposal shocked her and she turned him down as gently as she could. Her heart ached because there was no way she could not hurt him. He loved her and could not conceal it any longer and she knew what he'll unrequited love could be.
He went away and Amanda heard later that the flight he was travelling in crashed.
She prayed fervently that there was a mistake and that it was not the plane he was in but any other. She knew that she did not love him because her heart was already occupied with someone else though she was still hurting' but she still loved him like a brother and wanted him to live and do better than her. Find another person to live with. Someone who would love and care for him like he truely deserved. She knew that she was not that person though but it did not stop her from wishing that if peradventure it was his plane, then if there were any survivors, he should be one of them.
She vowed that she was going to do all in her power to nurse him back to health.
When she got to the airport, it was indeed the plane he was in and when she went to the morgue where the victims had been taken, she found his name listed as one of the corpse that had been brought there.
She sat down and cried. She felt responsible. If she had not turned him down, maybe he would not have been on that particular plane and Jack would not have been a dead man.
She felt that she had as good as pulled the trigger that killed him.
She was besieged by regret and pain for all his dreams for the future he had confided in her uring the days they had gone out to dinner.
She tried to assuage the guilt she felt by reasoning that if she had married him, it would have been an injustice to him. Being with him bodily while her heart was always with someone else. He would have come to resent her for the misery that would definitely have caused him and she had not wanted his resentment. But would his resentment not have been better than his death?
She pulled herself together and called his mother and told her. Her wail of anguish had broken her heart.
She had come and sorrowfully take her son's body out of the morgue to the cemetry for burial. All his engineering friends and colleges were in attendance and spoke so highly of him and his capabilities, stating that they had lost a very promising engineer.
His mother could not say much because she just could not stop crying
He had been her only hope and joy and now he was gone.
Amanda understood perfectly.
After the heart rendering burial, she found that she could not continue to stay there. There were too many memories of Jack. She quit her new job and went back to London where luckily, she found a job as a share analyst in a bank and that was where she met Sharon.
She lived with the pain of Wilson's betrayal and could not bring herself to find out what had happened to him, if he eventually married Jess or not. What was the use, it would only hurt her more to find out. She also grew to think less of Jack's painful death. Time indeed heals all wounds and she started going out again, opening her heart to people. She had had two more heartbreaks after Wilson's but none had really destroyed her or her confidence the way her failed affair with Wilson had. But she was still moving on because life was too short to spend it being moody. Jack's death had thought her that. If anyone had told her or him that that was going to be his last flight, he may not have believed just like she had had no inkling that day that it was going to be the last she would see him.
That was why she had started living life to the full because life had no guarantees.
Sharon remembered all these and thought that men could not be trusted with one's heart except of course the person was signing a warrant for a devastating heartbreak.
Look at her situation with Bryan and Amanda's with Wilson and then with Jack.
Jack may not have intended it that was but it had turned out to be a form of heartbreak to Amanda and had driven her on a guilt ride.
The situation Amanda had with Jack was almost similar to that which she had with Gerhard.
Gerhard, the charming German who had loved her but who she could not love in return because of her unrequited love for Bryan.
She wished she had loved Gerhard first, then maybe the tragedy could have been averted.
Amanda had told her of her experiences while she was pregnant with Bryan's child. Sharon had not known at the time that she was going to have no choice but to marry Gerhard or what could have led her into marrying him.
But now, she understood what Amanda must have felt when she lost Jack. At least she had the opportunity to assuage her guilt in some way, but Amanda did not have that opportunity and that could eat someone upwith guilt without Mercy.