Page 37 of Our Last Resort

“Answers.”

Émile startled. Just the tiniest bit, a quick widening of the eyes. Then, composure.

“At two in the morning?”

The hardest part of a lie, I learned in that moment, was telling it for the first time. I cleared my throat. Straightened myback. Then, with all the aplomb I could muster: “I couldn’t sleep. I have so many questions.”

My little voice, trying so hard to sound confident.

“What kind of answers?” he asked.

Émile’s bills rustled in my pocket. I felt a twinge of panic: He would look inside the box and see the missing cash.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

Émile cocked his head.

Don’t break.

Look at him.

He wasn’t the tallest man I would ever see—Gabriel would eventually outgrow him by a few generous inches—but he was, or seemed, the strongest, for sure. For one thing, he was the only well-fed human I had ever encountered. He worked out. He traveled. In the world we lived in, his intelligence was unrivaled. And I was a malnourished, thieving fifteen-year-old girl.

But I could love.

I could worship.

He needed that.

“You’re always answering questions I didn’t even know I had,” I said.

Émile dropped his bag to the floor. He walked to his desk.

“Like, for example…” I began.

My head was empty. Émile’s words made sense when he spoke them, but the second you tried to repeat them, they were like cigarette smoke between your fingers.

The one sermon I remembered: the one, all those years ago, that had gotten me sent to the Secret Place. The one that had brought Gabriel into my life.

“One time you said: ‘You have to face the truth of what’s inside you and act in consequence.’ ”

Émile considered me. Unreadable.

I would later understand that he, too, forgot his sermons as soon as he delivered them. They were word salads, utterly meaningless. But in that instant, I figured he was struck uponhearing his own words recited back to him, verbatim, conjured from the past.

“What did you mean by that?” I asked. “How do you face the truth of what’s inside you?”

Émile sat behind his desk. I held my breath. After what seemed like an eternity, but could only have been a few seconds, he gestured to the empty chair on the other side of it.

I sat, but stuck to the edge of the seat.

“It’s a good question,” he said.

It is?

“Because, you see…”

Émile talked. Talked and talked and talked. About life and how it was meant to be lived. The world and how it was meant to be searched. Words and words and words.

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