Rogue

“She had a commission and couldn't come on this trip. I'm glad she's not here. She's pretty squeamish. She faints if someone gets a paper cut. This wouldn't be for her. She's at the house in London.” She had moved in with him officially months before, which was a first for him too. Usually, women stayed with him for a while, and then just disappeared from his life. After seven months, Arabella was still around. Maxine was impressed.

“Is she a keeper?” she asked with a broad smile, finishing her tea.

“Could be,” he said, looking sheepish. “Whatever that means. I'm not as ballsy as you are, Max. I don't need to get married.” He thought it was a brave thing to do, but he was happy for her, if that was what she wanted. “I've been meaning to tell you, by the way. I want to give you and Charles your rehearsal dinner in Southampton. I feel like I owe you at least that.”

“You don't owe me anything,” she said gently, with her surgical mask hanging around her neck. The smell was still awful, but she couldn't drink her tea otherwise. She had given a mask to Blake too, and surgical latex gloves. She didn't want him getting sick, and it was easy to do in a place like this. Soldiers had been burying bodies all day, while family members wailed. It was an eerie, torturous sound, mercifully drowned out by the bulldozers some of the time.

“I want to do that for you. It'll be fun. Have the kids settled down yet?”

“No,” she said honestly, “but they will. Charles is a good man. He's just awkward with kids.” She told Blake about their first date then, and he laughed.

“I would have run like hell,” Blake confessed, “and they're my kids.”

“I'm surprised he didn't.” Maxine was smiling too. She didn't tell him how furious Charles had been that she had come to Morocco. Blake didn't need to know that, and his feelings might have been hurt, or like Daphne, he might have concluded that Charles was a jerk. Maxine felt a need to protect them both. As far as she was concerned, they were both good men.

She went back to the medical tent for a while after that, trying to help them work out a plan, and she talked to some of the paramedics about signs of severe trauma to look for, but at this point it was like trying to dig through a mountain with a spoon, not very effective and pretty crude.

She was up for most of the night with Blake, as he had been for days, and in the end they both slept in the Jeep that had brought her there, piled on top of each other like puppies. She didn't even think about what Charles's reaction would have been to that. It was entirely beside the point, and of no interest here. She could spend her time reassuring him when she got home. She had more important things to do now.

They spent most of Saturday with the children. She talked to as many of them as she could, and sometimes just held them, particularly the young ones. Many of them were getting sick, and she knew that some would die. She sent at least a dozen of them to the medical tent with volunteers. And it was dark before she and Blake stopped.

“What can I do?” Blake looked as helpless as he felt. Maxine was more used to this than he was, but it upset her too. There was such a huge need here, and so little at hand to fill it.

“Honestly? Not much. You're doing about as much as you can.” She knew he was pouring money and machinery into the rescue efforts, but by now they were finding only bodies, not survivors.

And then he shocked her with what he said next. “I want to take some of the kids home,” he said softly. It was a normal reaction. Others in similar circumstances had reacted that way before. But she knew that in situations like this, adopting orphans was not as simple as Blake may have thought.

“We all do,” she said quietly. “You can't take them all home.” The government was going to set up makeshift orphanages for them, and eventually feed them into their own system, and some might find their way into international agencies for adoption, but very few. Children like that usually stayed within their own countries and cultures. And most of the children around them were Muslims. They would be taken care of by their own. “The hardest part of this work is having to walk away. At some point, you've done all you can within the scope of your possibilities, and you have to go home. They stay.” It sounded harsh, but she knew that in most cases, that was true.

“That's my point,” he said sadly. “I can't do that. I feel like I owe something here. I can't just set up a pretty house, and show up with a bunch of fancy people now and then. I feel like I owe more than that, as a human being. You can't just take forever,” he said. It was a new discovery for him, and it had taken him a lifetime to get there.

“What about helping them right here, instead of trying to take them home? You could get caught up in red tape forever.”