Page 104 of Our Last Resort

Indeed. But who was I to judge? People did what they had to do for love, for money, for survival.

It was hard for me—and, I presumed, for Gabriel—to gauge exactly how rich Annie’s family was. Sometimes she seemed like the wealthiest person in America. At other times it was hard to imagine that America was filled with anything but Annies.

Materially, she had wanted for nothing. Private schools, tutors, vacations. Anytime I tried to run through the list in my head—the list of all the things Annie had enjoyed that I hadn’t—I had to start over, lower the standards: parents, a bedroom, food.

But she wanted to invite us in. From the moment she’d met Gabriel, she’d yearned to be the person who’d show him the world. Someone who bought graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate bars. Someone who asked her brand-new husband, as our last dinner in Spring Lake drew to a close, like it was nothing: “Do you want to start the fire?”

It took my breath away.

It really did.

Gabriel paused. He swallowed.

Then, as if he’d surrendered to something: “Sure.”

He turned to me.

“Wanna help?”

Are you out of your fucking mind?

But I couldn’t very well say that in front of Annie, so I followed him to the backyard.

I gritted my teeth as we each picked up a couple of logs from the garden shed.

“You good?” he asked.

I nodded. We’d had a good week. A goodlife,finally. No need to ruin everything with a fight.

But still. I was angry.

Wanna help?

So unnecessary. He knew I didn’t. And he was perfectly capable of building a campfire by himself. Why drag me into it?

There was an unspoken rule between us. We didn’t force each other to process things faster than we were able to.

It was an agreement we’d come to back when we still lived in the storage unit. Right after they caught Émile.

Here’s how it happened.

They didn’t get Émile for the girls.

Émile knew what he was doing. The girls were eighteen. There was no evidence left of what he’d done to them. To us. Only the word of a few women, all of them bad witnesses, since they’d spent their lives in a cult.

No. The girls were not trouble.

In the end, it came down to taxes. Émile—according to the newspapers—hadn’t filed a tax return in years. He owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the government. If convicted on all charges, one article said, he faced up to fifty years in prison.

Émile was forty-nine years old when he was arrested. A conviction meant he would, in all likelihood, die behind bars.

That didn’t mean anything to me. The fact of Émile’s suffering was just that: a fact.

And if, by some miracle, he didn’t die in prison, he’d be deported back to his native France after his release.

A small consolation prize: Gabriel and I did have something to do with his arrest. The fire had brought police to the compound. It had blown the doors to Émile’s building wide open for them—literally and figuratively. The cops had found documents (I pictured them stored in a trunk or a chest of drawers, somewhere far enough from Émile’s desk that they survived the blaze) that constituted probable cause. They’d obtained search warrants, and things escalated from there until Émile pleaded guilty.

“At least he won’t hurt anyone else now,” Gabriel said the day we found out.

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