Page 6 of Deliver Me

The media had done their best to find out while he was on trial, scouring through every inch of his personal life searching for one incident that might have explained it all. They interviewed his friends, his acquaintances, his teachers … None of them had answers. He was a decent kid—maybe a bit lonely, certainly wild and prone to mischief, but never violent. That hadn’t stopped the reporters from digging, turning over every facet of his life, his family’s lives.

She would have been seven when he was arrested, too young to remember the story, but the whole thing had been quite the scandal. There didn’t seem to be anything about his life that wasn’t splashed across the front page of some magazine or newspaper. He was the only child of a career politician and her handsome playboy husband. His mother, Lilah Miller, was from an extremely wealthy family and Gabriel had been raised surrounded by the finest things money could buy. If the media’sassessment of his early years was to be believed, he was a spoiled rich kid that had been provided with the best education, the fanciest homes, the most expensive vacations.

His family was small—a father, a mother, an uncle—but they were reported to have been close and happy, despite his father’s rumored affairs. There had been no sign of problems and as Mia clicked on another link, she discovered his mother’s brother was apparently a famous Evangelical pastor named Richard Miller, now deceased. His death had gotten quite a bit of national attention the year after Gabriel was convicted.

Lilah had apparently been elected to the US Senate when Gabriel was twelve and there were plenty of photos of her, too. There didn’t seem to be much of her in her son—he obviously got his looks from his father—but she was beautiful. A petite brunette with a charming smile, she appeared determined and sophisticated as she stood beside her family at press conferences and political events. There was never a hair out of place or a jacket wrinkle to be seen.

His family’s shimmering public image hadn’t helped Gabriel during the trial. His only supporters seemed to have been young women impressed by his looks or his fortune, and they had been widely mocked for their willingness to overlook his crimes for a pair of pretty eyes.

Every reporter, news anchor, and celebrity that had decided to weigh in on the subject—which had been almost all of them—had deemed him a spoiled brat with an anger problem that deserved to rot in prison and never see the light of day again.

Mia thought he was a spoiled rich kid that obviously needed better lawyers.

His mother, understandably upset about the circumstances of his arrest, had apparently refused to pay for his legal team, and his public defenders had done embarrassingly little defending. There was never even an attempt made to claim thathe hadn’t committed the crime of which he had been accused. It was freely acknowledged that Gabriel Myers had stabbed his father seven times in a dimly lit alley in Houston.

His reason, told through his lawyers because they didn’t allow him to take the stand, was rooted in family problems. There had apparently been prior behavioral issues, and his parents had sent him to live with his uncle, a decision that Gabriel had not handled well. When his father finally tracked him down after he had spent six months living on the streets with a group of runaways, he hadn’t wanted to return. There had been an altercation and it had gotten out of hand. They portrayed him as an impulsive child, panicking over a punishment and lashing out without thinking.

The jury hadn’t seen it that way—it had taken them less than three hours to return with a verdict.

Guilty.

He’d been too young for the death penalty, even in Texas, but that meant there was only one possible punishment remaining and he was sentenced to life, without the possibility of parole, at the age of sixteen.

There were plenty of videos from inside the courtroom since the trial itself was well televised, and his reaction—or lack thereof—to the verdict had been the cause of speculation for weeks. He had stood beside his lawyers, clean cut and stoic in his suit, as the rest of his life was taken from him. There had been no tears, no sudden slumping of his too stiff shoulders, no looking around for support or escape or even a friendly face.

Not that there would have been a friendly face anyway. His mother and uncle hadn’t attended the trial. The court had been forced to appoint a guardian for him, with one parent dead and the other still attending to her political career several states away and refusing to even acknowledge his existence.

Mia let the video play to its end, and another to take its place. It was even more obvious in the videos how cold and empty his eyes were now that she could see him move and breathe. He was emotionless as the legal teams called their witnesses and presented their evidence and wrangled fancy words at a jury that should have been somber but looked instead like they might secretly be enjoying the attention as they held a young man’s life in their hands.

But then, as yet another video played and the clock on her bedside table ticked relentlessly toward two a.m. and she felt her eyes begin to droop against her will, she saw it.

The prosecution had put up a large photo of his father in the courtroom to play on the sympathy of the jury—to let them see the humanity of the man who was murdered in a dirty alley by the child he had loved and raised—and Gabriel, who had spent most of the trial staring straight ahead and ignoring the proceedings entirely, turned his head to look at the face of his father.

She leaned forward and paused the video, staring at Gabriel in that one brief moment when the mask of indifference slipped. Her heart pounded and her breath caught painfully in her throat because there was a lost child in his eyes.

It was a look she recognized immediately—pain, anger, fear … and beneath that the kind of desperate shock that only comes from a loss that is so deep and so profound that you cannot speak of it.

The wood floor creaked beneath her feet as she padded down the stairs, skipping the loudest one by habit and guiding herself only by the light of the moon that streamed in the windows so that she didn’t wake her father.

It took her a few minutes of careful rummaging in the downstairs office to find what she was looking for, but when she did, she said a quick prayer of thanksgiving and ran nimbly backup the stairs to her room, a small photo album now tucked under her arm.

She crawled back into her bed and began to skim through it in the low light of her laptop screen. It was full of old photos of herself, most of them unremarkable with her wide smile and normal family, but those weren’t the ones that she was looking for. She finally pulled out two, taken several years apart, and held them up beside the computer. She looked at each of them in turn and then back again to Gabriel Myers’ face, still frozen on the screen.

The first, taken when she first arrived with the Anderson’s, showed a small and sickly little girl with mouse-brown hair and too many freckles in a pink dress that hung limply off her body. She was so thin that even in pictures her bones poked painfully at her skin. Alone and frightened, she’d been traumatized from being bounced from foster home to foster home as each deemed her unruly and difficult to discipline.

The second was taken the day of her mother’s funeral. It was a bit blurry, a quick snapshot someone had taken of her and her father, both dressed in relentless black and standing helplessly in the sea of flowers that had been given in futile hopes to help ease their grief. She had changed, gotten long-limbed and healthy by the time of the second photo, though she’d kept the soft brown hair and the freckles.

In both of the photos, she had the same broken look in her eyes that Gabriel did sitting in that courtroom looking at a picture of his father. If God worked in mysterious ways, perhaps he had led her to Gabriel because she was the only person in the world who would have seen that look and recognized it for what it was because she’d felt it herself.

She clicked on her bedside lamp, creating a little pool of light to push back the darkness, and pulled a sheet of paper and a pen from her desk drawer.

Gabriel,

I was too young to remember it when it happened, but you were right, a little time on the internet today showed me your trial was quite a spectacle. You got your fifteen minutes of fame out of it, anyway. I think they must have splashed the horrifying details all over every newspaper and TV show in the country.

You stabbed your own father, left him lying dead in a pool of his own blood because you didn’t feel like going home to your nice house and your pampered life. You were obviously spoiled, out of control, and dangerous.

Is that what you wanted me to say?

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