Page 52 of Our Last Resort

“At any point during dinner, did you see Mrs.Brenner?”

“She was in the dining room,” Gabriel says.

Yes.Sabrina, beautiful and alive, dipping a piece of pita into hummus, wiping the corner of her mouth with a quick flick of her thumb, her pink acrylics shimmering even in the dimmed lighting.

“Did you notice anything unusual?”

I hold my position against the sliding door. The sun is already beating down on the hotel, dappling my shirt with sweat. Every surface around me so white, so bright.

Another silence. Gabriel must be gazing at the ceiling, biting his lip the way he sometimes does when trying to focus.

“Actually, yes,” he says. “She and her husband—they had a quick dinner. Just appetizers, I think. Everyone else was still eating when they left.”

“Do you know why that was?”

“No idea.”

“At any point in the evening,” Harris continues, “did you lose sight of Frida?”

Gabriel’s answer rings from the other side of the glass pane, clear and immediate: “No.”

My hand almost slips from the door. I flex the muscles in my arm and try to still myself.

Images from that night come back to me. Indisputable.

During our meal, between our appetizers and mains, Gabriel got up from his chair.

“I’m just going to grab a sweater.”

He said it, and then I lost him for a few minutes. I sipped my chamomile-infused water and waited.

Gabriel reappeared a short while later, clutching a sweater I’d never seen before this vacation, a sleek cream knit that looked impossible to fold.

“What did I miss?” he said.

It was all so innocent, so completely innocuous. The hotel was still full of people milling about. All this little interlude did was delay the arrival of our entrées by fifteen minutes.

Gabriel said he was going to get a sweater, and he came back with a sweater.

Why not tell the truth?

Does he not remember?

Maybe his memories are jumbled.

Or—maybe he’s panicking. That’s how it all began, with Annie: a woman’s dead body, police asking questions. Enough to unsettle the steadiest person. Gabriel’s most painful memories unlocked, the stitches of his trauma coming undone.

“What time did you go to bed?” Harris asks.

“A little before midnight.”

“Did you hear anything unusual?”

“Not until the morning, when we heard a scream.”

That’s not exactly true, either. Gabriel heard Sabrina and William arguing during the night; he told me as much. But if Gabriel were to disclose that, then he would have to tell Harris that he had stepped out of the suite to look for me. And evidently he’s not prepared to do that.

“Thanks for being forthcoming,” Deputy Harris says.

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