Disclaimer: Jericho is not mine.
Heather had been sure that her saved up words about Roger would be spilling out within the week. She and Emily would hug and a few moments of awkward silence caused by the knowledge that maybe there would be things neither of them would ever understand because they hadn't been there would be washed away by the joy of knowing that they were alright (and being alright meant you had a chance to work yourself back to okay again).
It wouldn't come up in that first conversation (because that would be weird), but the two of them would sit down for an actual talk soon enough. Emily would tell her her version of how Roger had had to leave town and say something that meant Heather's promise was fulfilled. Heather would tell her, Em would get teary, and Heather would go with her to the information booth for J&R. She had thought she had known generally (if not exactly) how it would all go.
That become forefront of her thoughts when she was being held by the crazy from New Bern who was "waiting for the right moment" to make a gift of her to Constantino. She honestly couldn't say whether the man would still want her dead or not given that they were supposedly two towns united in the face of the situation at the moment. She supposed it might be a pride and vengeance thing, but she also found it difficult to believe that she was that high on anyone's priority list. She didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it. There was nothing she could do to change whether or not Constantino was keeping the hit order in place.
All she knew was that no one came looking for her. It occurred to her in a dark moment that no one ever came looking for her. She didn't have family. She used to think that didn't matter because she had really good friends. That wasn't serving her well in this instance. The ones in New Bern (if there were still any) would not know she was missing in the first place. Jake had taken off on his mission, and who knows whether he would have noticed she was gone until he needed something from her in any case. Beck had been ready to turn on her in an instant, and she wasn't sure where the two of them stood now. Things had been both swift moving and crazy. Both of them had other things to worry about. (Sometimes, Heather filled the hours with tracing the path of how it was that cynicism had started to come to her so naturally.)
Then, there was Emily. Emily, who had been her best friend once, should have been demanding that someone check something out once she realized that she was gone. There had been a time when she would have said that with certainty. There had been a lot of things of which she was certain once upon a time. Would Emily ask questions? Would Emily realize? She sometimes thought that she and Emily hadn't been the friends she had thought they were. Other times, she thought it was just that Emily wasn't wired to react the same way. She supposed that it didn't really matter, but it gave her something to use to fill her thoughts and her time.
Who else was there to notice she wasn't where she was supposed to be? Mary? Mary and she hadn't exactly been drop in on each other types. She would be busy coordinating the bar as an information center. Eric? Eric hadn't spoken to her about anything other than the radio the entire time she had been back. Their brief bonding over the events in New Bern seemed to have melted away with their respective escapes from the town.
She didn't like feeling this way. She tried to talk herself out of it a hundred times. There wasn't much else to do besides plot out attempts at escape that were never going to happen with the broken leg that her captor had felt was necessary for her security. The dark thoughts about how unimportant she was to everyone else's lives were, at least, a respite from the pain that shot through her every time her weight shifted.
It seemed odd that she could be valuable enough to a megalomaniacal dictator wannabe to be considered a gift while she was of so little value to everyone else that no one would likely notice she was gone unless someone needed a repair on the radio equipment. She paused at that thought. No, that equipment probably wasn't a secret from their military contingent any longer. She was very sure that someone among Beck's soldiers would be able to handle it and likely more efficiently as well. There was no longer any reason to need her for that.
She was not in a good place mentally. She knew that. The truth was that she was kind of scaring herself. On the other hand, she also found herself with a determined sort of clarity. It didn't really matter what happened with Constantino. She wasn't looking to be killed, but if it happened, then there wasn't a lot she could do about it right now. She thought she could go out with a pleased sort of satisfaction that the reason that he ostensibly wanted her dead (her bringing the military down on them in the first place as well as the partial destruction of his munitions plant) was something in which she could take pride.
She had no regrets about either of those actions. She would never take back stopping the neighbor against neighbor onslaught of the New Bern attack (even if she hadn't been nearly quick enough to stop the death toll from starting). The only thing she would take back about the munitions was not doing a better and a faster job of getting rid of them. Maybe she was going to die soon. Maybe something else would happen. Either way, she wasn't going to pretend to be sorry that she had messed with the man's plan.