Page 149 of Our Last Resort

He’s crying.

I let him.

Then, in a movement so swift I don’t register it until I’m in his arms, he pulls me to him. It’s a forceful gesture, desperate, raw. My lip bumps against his shoulder. His arms are clasped around me, constricting my rib cage. I can breathe, but barely. There’s just enough air for me to start crying, too.

If he squeezed a little harder,I think,then that would be it.I can almost hear my spine snapping like a twig.

But he doesn’t squeeze harder. He sobs. It’s almost silent at first, then he puts his voice into it. Here we stand, Gabriel’s weight almost crushing me, the great force of his grief, of his sorrow, pushing me into the earth.

We cry together.

Slowly, his incoherent sounds separate into words. I can’t make them out. “Done…hoo.” I pull back a couple of inches, enough to let him speak properly. Still holding on to me, still far too close for me to look into his eyes, he says it: “I would have done it, too.”

I go still.

“I would have done the same thing,” he says through his tears. “If she’d told me instead of you. I would have done it, too.”

My mind leaves the moment, surrenders to this alternative chain of events. In another world, Annie brings her discovery about the fire, about Edwina, to Gabriel. He resolves to kill her. He lies in wait at Paterson Great Falls. When the time comes, he shoves her over the barrier.

But this isn’t the world we exist in. Annie came to me. I did it.

I will forever be the one who did it.

“I would have,” Gabriel says, his sentence cut short by wet, desperate sobs. “I would.”

I don’t try to argue. Gabriel knows himself. He knows what he’s capable of. He has spent years wrestling with his own mind.

That’s why he couldn’t believe me, when I told him, over and over again, that I believed in his innocence. That I knew—really knew—he hadn’t killed Annie.

He couldn’t believe it himself. In a corner of his mind, Gabriel always saw the possibility of his own guilt.

Whatever we recognized in each other all those years ago, it’s here. Burned into the ground underneath our feet. It’s in the roots of the trees, in the air around us.

A time-bending force. Two kids grasping at the future, two adults wrapped in the tight vines of their past.

It’s love, in the end.

Love is the scorpion.

EpilogueNew York City

December

Gabriel and I meet outside the studio.

It’s a small space, rented by the producers for the day. I traveled down from the Upper West Side; Gabriel came from the Village.

He moved back a month ago. Didn’t tell me until he was already there, in his new apartment, surrounded by boxes.

I don’t think he did it for me.

I think, after nine years, he had nothing left to hide from.

We see each other sometimes. Often enough that even when the time between our meetups starts to stretch, I don’t worry that he’s truly gone.

I sleep at night now. Not as blissfully as I did at the Staircase Inn. But, for better or worse, I fall asleep and wake up on roughly the same schedule as the rest of polite society.

Two weeks ago, Gabriel told me, over coffee, that the time had come.

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