Page 132 of Our Last Resort

“I understand.”

I did. And I understood, too, that Gabriel had let her down in a million ways. He hadn’t treated her the way she deserved to be treated. Their meet-cute, their quick wedding, their supersonic drive on the highway to domestic bliss—it was all supposed to add up to a certain fairy tale. He hadn’t delivered that. And now he was, maybe, a man who had killed a woman.

Perhaps Annie, on some level, hoped she was wrong. But she wouldn’t take my word for it. Only the cops’. She needed the police to look into it and tell her.

“Have you spoken to anyone else?” I asked. “About this?”

She shook her head.

“I went to you first. You’re his— Well, you’re close,” she said. “I think you’re the person closest to him. You know him better than I do.”

A wife’s admission of defeat. It hurt her because it was true. It had never stopped being true.

The loneliness of Annie, on my couch. Unable to speak to her own husband. Unable to tell her own friends. I pictured them: young, unburdened, golden. Unattuned to so many of life’s complications. Maybe they’d warned her about Gabriel.This guy, really?Maybe they’d known Annie could have done better. Married someone worldlier, more stable, certainly more established.

Annie wouldn’t have wanted to tell her friends they’d been right. That the whirlwind had been just that, a whirlwind. That a whirlwind is, after all, just another name for a tornado.

She stood up.

“I thought you’d understand,” she said.

Oh, Annie.

“Why?”

“Because you’re always so…good.”

“I am?”

“Oh my god, Frida.” She grasped her head between her hands, a pantomime of exasperation. “You’re like, the most moral person I know. Honestly, it’s annoying sometimes.”

I shook my head, unable to meet her eyes.Moral?

“I get it,” she said. “I have this inherited wealth, and I’m spoiled, and everything I have is an offense to you.”

“That’s not—”

“But now my husband—the guy I’mmarriedto—confessed to a fucking murder in his sleep and you want me to keep quiet about it?”

I stood, too. A red light was flashing in my mind.

“I’m not telling you what to do,” I said. “But please. Just take a moment to think about this.”

She snatched her purse from the sofa and headed for the door.

“I can’t believe you,” she said. “Honestly. I thought you were better than this. Better than…him.”

But I wasn’t.

I never was better than Gabriel.

We hadn’t killed anyone on purpose. That, I knew.

Almost six years had passed since the fire. It was entirely possible that no hard evidence was left, though I had no way to be sure of that. (The container of gasoline—that was the bit I kept going back to. I remembered tossing it. Had it burned? Or had it drifted somewhere in the chaos, and was it waiting, tangled in some tall grass, half-buried in some nearby woods, to ruin our lives?)

Even if no solid trace of our actions remained, there was always secondary evidence: witness accounts, not just fromformer cult members, but also from the man who’d sold us our train tickets, and the conductor who’d checked them. Men from Émile’s world could testify that Gabriel knew where to find the gasoline. And the women—they knew about Émile and what he did to the girls. They knew the part Edwina played. How hard would it be to present those facts as motive?

We hadn’t killed anyone on purpose, but it wouldn’t be impossible to convince a jury that we had.

---