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Thank God, in a way, that the Maldives were the playground for all the ultra-rich It helped me sidestep a little bit of red tape

By the tiot all my paperwork filled out in Sri Lanka for a replaceet back to the Maldives and strangle Bellamy for all the hassle

He would deserve it, if you asked me

Instead, I got a cheap hotel room and soet et on my way

All this while, I absolutely did not spend hours and hours thinking about the bastard who put me in this situation

I actually felt guilty about leaving theh I knew they were “stranded” in a luxury villa with plenty of food and water And that, eventually, Adnan’s ould realize he wasfor him

They would be fine

And, hopefully, Bellamy would just cut his losses and head back to the states to drown his disappointne in one of his other mansions

I didn’t want to think about hi me

Partly because a part of ain would be Trying to stab hi him? But also partly because I understood the kind of wealth that Bellamy had It was the kind ofthey saw nothing when he kidnapped a woet aithme disappear a second time if he wanted to

I had to get the hell away as quickly as possible

Luckily foraccident where my important documents fell overboard and sank to the bottom of the ocean And I was relatively easy to look up once they had me there

So I got my new photo ID

I handed over my DS-64 and my DS-11, paid my hundred-fifty bucks for my new passport out of Bellamy’s stack of cash, and I was finally allowed to leave Sri Lanka to head back to the states two days later

With no sign of Bellamy

And I absolutely was not disappointed about that fact

And I didn’t obsess about him or fantasize about his private plane over the course of the twenty-so hours of travel I did from Sri Lanka to Qatar, from Qatar to New York, then from New York back to New Jersey