Page 74 of Our Last Resort

“Sure,” he said.

Under a bare-limbed red oak, Gabriel sat next to me. Our shoulders were touching. It was well below freezing. I wore my ratty sweater and my thin coat over my nightgown, pants underneath, my blanket wrapped around my shoulders. The night wind didn’t care; it reached my skin as easily as if I’d been naked.

Gabriel and I huddled. Our breaths made foggy shapes in the dark. I felt the warmth of my brother’s exhale, the soft widening and collapsing of his rib cage.

I told him what had happened. I didn’t know the proper words—didn’t know therewereproper words. I described it as best as I could, and when I was done, Gabriel was wincing.

“I can’t stay,” I said.

Speaking the words out loud made it sound so deliberate. It gave the whole enterprise the illusion of choice.

Gabriel shifted away from me. The cold nipped at the side of my body against which he’d been resting.

“No,” he said. “You can’t.”

He said more things:I’m so sorryandAre you okayandEdwina.

I waved his outrage away. There was no time.

“I can’t go by myself,” I said.

In the silence that followed, I was suspended in the air. I was droplets of condensation. I was a breeze so thin it could barely be felt.

Gabriel swallowed. Ran a hand through his hair. Gazed up at the sky.

“You can’t,” he said again.

He looked at me then. We were back in the Secret Place, the two of us in the unknowable darkness.

“You don’t want to go,” I said.

He shook his head.

“It’s complicated.”

A chasm opened in me.

I was going to lose him, too.

After all this time. After all this love.

“Actually, no,” Gabriel said, his voice louder—almost too loud. “Forget what I just said. It’s not complicated at all.”

The relief.

And the vindication: What Émile had done was unacceptable to Gabriel, too.

“We can’t just go, though,” Gabriel said. “It’s too easy for him. If we just go. He gets to keep doing it. He gets to keep…everything.”

Oh.

“You mean we should do something?” I asked.

He nodded.

“But what?”

“I don’t know yet,” he said.

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