Page 66 of Our Last Resort

He plants his palms on the bedspread to push himself up. I grab his left wrist, the one closest to me, and stop him.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I got scared.”

He snaps his wrist from my hand.

“Gabriel,” I say. “Please. We need to talk about—”

“I don’t want to talk.”

He’s not yelling. In fact, he’s almost too calm, adjusting his position, rubbing a hand over his face.

Gabriel. Always pushing things down. Swallowing back his anger, his hurt pride, his shame. Yearning, always, to be not just better than the rest of us, but better than himself.

“Come on,” I say. “Lying? To a cop?” It’s a relief, of sorts, to speak this absurdity out loud, to dump Gabriel’s poor choices at his feet. “People probably saw you! They’ll remember you leaving the dining room, and they’ll remember you speaking to Sabrina. They’ll tell Harris, if they haven’t told him already. And then what?”

Gabriel glances at me over his shoulder.

“You have no idea,” he says.

“Then tell me.”

“What?”

“Tell me what’s going on. Gabriel, we’ve been here for six days, and sometimes I feel like—”

Sometimes I feel like there’s no limit to the things you’re holding back from me.

“Take a guess,” he says.

“What?”

He stands.

“I don’t know,” I say, and get up, too. “Maybe you panicked. Maybe you didn’t want to…”

He opens his mouth.

“Maybe you didn’t want to get into the details with Harris,” I try again. “Maybe you figured it would be easier that way, after everything…else that happened.”

Gabriel steps toward the sliding door.

“Not that I think you have anything to—”

When he turns around, every muscle in his face is tensed up.

He’s outraged.

I’ve never had to spell it out. Never had to say anything to the effect of:I don’t think you had anything to do with it; I don’t think for a second that you killed your wife.

Gabriel’s innocence has always gone without saying. That was the case when he reported Annie missing and when the cops searched his house and all three times Gabriel spoke to them. It stayed that way when the neighbors turned on him and when he packed two suitcases and boarded a one-way flight to Seattle.

And now I’ve just made it look like his innocence does, in fact, need to be stated.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“See, that’s the problem.” There’s a simmering quality to Gabriel’s voice, somehow worse than if he were yelling. “I never know, with you. I can’t ever tell for sure what you believe.”

I want to walk up to him, put a hand on his shoulder, calm us both down, but his words have pinned me to my spot.

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