Page 114 of Our Last Resort

She tells him things, too. She was born and raised in New Jersey. Gabriel keeps his expression blank. He doesn’t tell her he used to live there, too. With Annie. In fact, he doesn’t tell Sabrina he was once married. She doesn’t ask for that information, and he doesn’t volunteer it.

How old was she, when Annie died? Thirteen, at most fourteen. It’s not surprising that she doesn’t place him. Gabriel, to her, is simply the kind stranger she happened to bump into at a luxury hotel.

Sabrina tells him about her mother, who owns a hair salon. About her string of stepfathers. “None of them turned out to be the dad who stepped up,” she says with a wry little laugh. Gabriel says he’s sorry.

“It’s okay,” she says. “It is what it is.”

There’s something brave and resilient about her. Someone who social-climbed but never forgot where she came from.

Gabriel and Sabrina sit in silence for a moment.

Then: “You must be thinking I’m nuts,” she says. “Telling a perfect stranger my life like this.”

“I’m not thinking that,” he says.

Maybe he’s not thinking at all.

A quiet supplication hangs between them like mist.

Please. Please, keep telling me your life.

“I used to work at a bar,” she says. “This cocktail bar for rich people. Well, rich men, mainly.”

That’s where she met William Brenner. He was a customer.

“The first time he came in, he left me a two-hundred-dollar tip and his number on the receipt,” she says, and beams. “I was smitten.”

A lot of people think she married him for his money, she says, but she really was. Smitten.

He took her to Broadway shows, to old New York steakhouses.

“Sometimes, he did these extravagant things,” she says. “Like out of a movie.”

Once, on her day off, he invited her to the opera. In the afternoon, while she was getting ready, the intercom buzzed. She rented a room in Chelsea back then. Her roommate called out for her. When Sabrina stepped into the living room, a massive box was waiting for her, with a silver bow tied around it and the name of a Frenchmaison de couturein elegant white letters.

“It was this incredible dress,” she says. “Black velvet. Silk princess gloves.” Her fingers trace an invisible line from her hands to above her elbow, as if she can intuit that this young man—with his bathing suit and his flip-flops and his hunched shoulders—does not know what princess gloves are.

“You know what really got me?” she says. “He remembered the shoes. Black stilettos. They were in the box, with the dress. It’s like he thought about it, you know? And realized I wouldn’t own anything nice enough to go with it?”

Sabrina chews her lip.

“That blew my mind,” she says. “I think that was when I knew I’d marry him, if he ever asked.”

Which he did, three months later, at a French restaurant called La Grenouille. He slid the ring—a diamond the size of a cherry tomato—across the table.

“It was a small wedding,” she says. “At his house in the Hamptons. It was his third time, so.”

Gabriel nods politely.

“You want to see a photo?” Sabrina asks.

Gabriel doesn’t really want to see a photo of thebeautiful Sabrina marrying William, but she seems excited, so he acquiesces.

Sabrina’s not an idiot. She chooses a photo that shows her by herself, without her husband. She’s the most radiant third wife the world has ever seen. Her dress is tasteful, but in the taken-in waist, the slight bouffant of the skirt, the bouquet of closed-up peonies, Gabriel senses the excitement of a first-time bride.I don’t want to go full princess,the outfit seems to say,but when am I going to get another chance?

“So beautiful,” he whispers.

When he realizes he said this out loud, his face burns.

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