Page 135 of Our Last Resort

I lost parts of my mind. The ones that knew peace. I became someone who sees a nightmare in every shadow. Who had a panic attack after witnessing the arrest of William Brenner,because I saw myself in his place—the handcuffs aroundmywrists, a police officer leadingmeaway.

Even my thing with the mob show. I liked it well enough before Annie’s death. But after? Ineededthe mobsters. All of them well dressed, lovable,human.So many of them murderers. They killed one another. Killed people they loved. Killed their own friends, their own relatives. They buried bodies. Dismembered them. And then?

They went on with it. Went home to their families. They laughed. They cried. Theylived.

I felt like they understood.

They, too, did what they had to do.

HowdidI get away with it?

Logistics. It’s all about logistics.

You don’tcommit murder.You complete a series of steps at a certain time, in a certain place.

Every scenario has a weakness. This was true for me. It must also be true for William Brenner.

If I think about what I did wrong—and what I did right—then maybe I can decode his mind, too. Maybe I can save Gabriel.

I see them like parallel lines, my lucky breaks and William’s.

Mine: I didn’t anticipate how much the place of Annie’s death would play in my favor. Bodies of water, as it turns out, are hard and expensive to search. Detectives did look at the falls after Gabriel reported Annie missing, but she was still in the water at the time. They only found her two weeks later, when she surfaced, having drifted several miles downstream. The water had done its damage by then. It was impossible to determine a cause of death.

William’s: that Sabrina cheated on him with a man who was once accused of murder. The perfect suspect for the cops to sink their teeth into.

Sometimes, though, the unexpected is just that: a key factor you overlook, because you don’t know what you don’t know.

For me: I did not expect that people would latch onto Gabriel as a suspect the way they did.

It was my fault entirely.

I’d been out in the world for almost six years. I was catching up as quickly as I could, but I didn’t know aboutIt’s always the husband.It didn’t occur to me to imagine a world where the person most likely to kill a woman is the man she chose to marry.

By the time I realized, it was too late.

I understood. It wasn’t Gabriel, but it was a lot of husbands, a lot of the time. The assumption that he had killed Annie wasn’t unfair, just incorrect.

And there was that small broken bone at the back of Annie’s throat. The hyoid bone. When it breaks, the fracture is often indicative of strangulation. That’s not what happened with Annie. I never wrapped my hands around her neck. It was the fall, it was the water, it was the fish. It was whatever happened to Annie after I left her.

But it completed the picture of Gabriel’s guilt perfectly, in people’s minds.

William overlooked something, too.

Me.

He underestimated me, my nosiness. And of course, he assumed Gabriel was the one who’d killed Annie.

He doesn’t know I searched Gabriel’s backpack just yesterday. Doesn’t know that I know he planted the rock.

William has no idea how many hours I’ve spent thinking about evidence and the ways it disappears.

When I returned from the waterfall, I changed the clothes I’d been wearing. My shoes, too. I didn’t think anyone had seen me, but I didn’t want to take any chances. Didn’t want to risk the police looking in my closet and finding an outfit matching an eyewitness’s description. Didn’t want them to look at the soles of my shoes and find a particular kind of dirt caked in the grooves, which just happened to match the soil at Paterson Great Falls.

I stuffed my cast-off clothes and shoes in a dumpster a hundred miles away. Then I took my rental to a car wash before returning it.

And that was it.

When Gabriel called me to say Annie had gone missing, I had to play along.

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