Page 145 of Our Last Resort

“Come with me,” he says.

And so I do.

We leave our bags in the lobby. Gabriel leads me outside to the entrance lounge. Where I spoke to Harris on the fifth day. Where I tried to get him to focus on William Brenner, before the hotel closed around us like a trap.

We sit on a bench, in the shade of a sail canopy.

Gabriel looks at me. I can’t meet his gaze for more than a second.

“I don’t know what to say to you,” he whispers.

The emptiness hangs between us. Maybe there is nothing left to say, nothing left to do.

Unless.

“I’ll confess,” I tell Gabriel. “I’ll tell the police it was me.”

After all this time.

After I got away with it.

But it’s the only decent thing to do.

Gabriel shakes his head.

“Don’t,” he says.

“But—”

“I’ve lost enough people.”

He looks somewhere beyond me. He looks, I think, at all his ghosts. The world we left. Simon. Edwina. Annie. The parents we never knew. Émile.

“You don’t get to take away the only person I have left just to put your conscience to rest,” he says. “You just don’t.”

His words silence me like a blow to the head.

“I know,” he continues. “I know that William probably saw me that night. I know it’s what started the argument.”

He swallows with difficulty.

“I heard voices, when they were arguing. I did. And I went in the opposite direction.”

His gaze settles back on me. I force myself not to look away.

“She died because of something I did,” he says. “I do know that.”

“It wasn’t your—”

Gabriel shakes his head in a silentDon’t.

Just don’t.

44New York City

The Aftermath

For three months, I don’t hear from him.

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