Page 105 of Our Last Resort

This was a part of us I’d come to hate. So resilient. Such survivors, all the time.

It infuriated me.

Two mornings later, Gabriel couldn’t get up.

“Come on,” I told him.

“Can’t.”

“Migraine?”

Gabriel grunted that his head was fine.

“Let’s go, then,” I tried again.

He turned to face the wall. Frustration coursed through me. But it occurred to me—just in time, just as I was about to erupt—that whatever was happening to Gabriel, he couldn’t control it.

Émile’s arrest meant that this was it. That there was nowhere left to return to. That the only life available to us was this one, and it was barely a life at all.

Gabriel was sick with this new world. The one he had journeyed to just for me.

I owed him.

So I worked. Gabriel didn’t.

I bought food for two with money for one. I washed our clothes in the storage facility’s sink. I bought more ibuprofen. I heated up soup on a camping stove. I played music for him on the portable radio I’d purchased from the dollar store.

This went on for six months.

It was love. It was, simply, what we did for each other.

So why couldn’t he give me a break, with the campfire?

Maybe he couldn’t face it without me.

Maybe fire was something we’d always have to take care of together.

Gabriel dropped his firewood next to the pit. I did the same thing. Then he showed me how to do it, the kindling first, the tinder second. I hated every minute of it. In a corner of my brain, we were back at the cult—a boy building a fire for Émile, all of us gathering around the flames.

Annie, oblivious to all of this, was in the kitchen, putting plates into the dishwasher.

“Ta-da!” she said when she came out, nudging the door open with her hip, balancing a platter with both hands.

In addition to the usual—according to Annie—grahamcrackers, marshmallows, and chocolate, she’d set out a few extra fixings: peanut butter cups, cut-up strawberries, white chocolate chips.

“Why don’t we enjoy the fire for a bit,” she said, setting the platter on a small patio table. “Then, dessert.”

I sat in one of the Adirondack chairs arranged in a semicircle around the pit and stared into the fire. This thing. Organic, almost alive.

What if I put my hand in, what if my sleeve caught fire, how hot would my skin get, would it hurt would it blister would it bubble would it foam would it—

“I’ll be back,” Gabriel said, and got up.

He made it look like he’d left something inside, or was going to the bathroom. But I knew. This was someone whose grief had once pinned him to the ground for six months. He couldn’t stand it, either—sitting by the fire, with nothing to look at but the flames.

Annie, leaning back in her own Adirondack chair, was swirling her leftover rosé from dinner.

“So,” she said. “Are you…seeing anyone?”

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