Page 13 of Our Last Resort

“Don’t apologize to him,” I say. “He attacked—”

“It’s okay,” Gabriel cuts me off. “I was in the wrong. I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.”

My brother looks at the crowd. “I apologize, everyone. I didn’t mean to start anything.”

I shake my head.

Gabriel wraps an arm around my shoulders and directs me away from the scene.

“It’s fine,” he mutters, but I can feel him folding into himself. His hand shakes above my arm; his heart pounds against my ribs.

Gabriel keeps walking. Soon, he’s no longer guiding my steps, but holding on to me for support.

I place an arm around his back.

Something travels between us. Memories pulsing with anxiety, a dark hole that nearly swallowed Gabriel’s life almost a decade ago. What happens to husbands when their wives are found dead.

6Escalante, Utah

The Fifth Day

Most people are handed one true-crime story, at most. Gabriel got two.

First, there was Émile. Then, there was Annie.

Gabriel was twenty-one when they met. Their romance unfolded rapidly, like a montage in a Hollywood movie: dates, drinks, dinners. After six months of dating, a ring. A house in New Jersey.

It was fast, but their love was in a hurry. Maybe they could sense they didn’t have much time.

After just two years of marriage, Gabriel returned one evening to an empty home. He waited. Tried to get in touch with Annie. Nothing. Gabriel dialed 911 and reported his wife missing. Then he called me. By the time I arrived, police had taken over the house and told him to wait outside while they searched it. They took Gabriel to the police station for an interview.

Two weeks later, they found Annie’s body in the water, a few miles from a waterfall on one of her favorite running trails.

Gabriel spoke to the cops two more times in the following month. They let him go. All three times, they let him go. Gabriel was never charged.

But people couldn’t move on. The headlines blared for months. It didn’t help that the police declined to name a new suspect, or to charge anyone at all. The focus was forever on Gabriel. There wasn’t a cable news channel or newspaper that didn’t pick up the story. Annie’s murder was, in their telling, a domestic tragedy that belonged to the nation. “Anonymous sources” were happy, even eager, to discuss the time they’d overheard an argument coming from Annie and Gabriel’s house. Maybe someone crying. Maybe Annie complaining about their finances.

I did what I could. When people whispered, I raised my voice. When they shot Gabriel withering stares, I stared right back.

It wasn’t enough. Gabriel went to unlock his car one morning and found the side mirrors smashed. Later that day, he went to park it and was greeted by furious letters across his garage door,KILLERspray-painted in dripping red cursive.

Who could have lived like that? Not Gabriel. He moved to the West Coast and started over in Seattle.

I understood the need to move. ButSeattle—really? We’d never been there.

“Exactly,” he said when I questioned his choice.

“What about Florida?” I asked. “What about Texas? Illinois?”

What about anywhere that’s not in the Tri-State Area but remains reasonably accessible to me?

But he wouldn’t budge. Gabriel was determined to put as much distance as he could between himself and the state of New Jersey.

And for what?

The case has stuck to him like a second skin. For nearly nine years now, a faction of the internet has feasted on it, coming up with flamboyant theories, filing requests for various documents.

I tried to hold on to him. In the end, I lost him in every possible way.

---