Page 139 of Plunge into Obsession

I climbed the shelves and reached for the box, nearly dropping it on my way down. It was lighter than I imagined it would be, and I could hear something rattling around in the box that sounded like papers or books of some sort.

I sat down on the floor and opened the lid.

It never even crossed my mind that perhaps I should mind my own business.

Gabriel seemed to know all there was to know about me, so why did I care about giving him his privacy?

What I found inside was not what I expected. I tried to focus, my mind working to make sense of what I was seeing.

Photographs.

Old photographs, from the looks of it, and if I wasn’t mistaken, the pictures were of Gabriel when he was little and of a boy who looked just like him, but maybe a year or two younger.

His brother?

The brothers were obviously close, with the way the boys stood together, but Gabriel…

Gosh, even as a little boy, he had the same look on his face as he did as an adult in the public eye.

What happened to Gabriel as a child to make him look so cynical? Would our child look like that?

I couldn’t even imagine.

His little brother, though…

Whatever had happened to Gabriel didn’t happen to him, or if it did, it didn’t affect him the way it had Gabriel.

No, it was much worse.

He wasn’t serious or cynical like Gabriel.

This little boy looked—

I swallowed, my throat feeling dry.

He looked dead inside.

He looked so angry at the world. Almost as if he already had himself convinced the world owed him something, and he would take it, no matter what.

What the hell happened to them?

Gabriel’s brother gazed off to the side, almost as if he didn’t want to look at the person taking the picture, while Gabriel looked at his little brother with fierce protectiveness.

Lot of good it seemed to do his brother. I presumed things didn’t turn out well, since I had never met, let alone heard Gabriel talk about his brother.

I wondered if it was because something had happened to his brother, and it pained Gabriel to talk about him, or if it was something else.

Something worse?

I kept looking through the pictures.

They seemed to be snapshots of Gabriel’s childhood with his brother. The pictures started when Gabriel was probably ten or so, and upward to, I would say, about his late teens, early twenties, and then it just… stopped.

My heart pounded in my chest, and I fought the urge to go look for Gabriel.

I knew he was okay, but somehow, seeing the photos stop so abruptly sent a surge of panic through me.

One thing I did know, though. I had an idea of what happened to the brothers.

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