Page 101 of Our Last Resort

The Seventh Day

As soon as I enter our suite, I feel Gabriel’s presence.

I find him on the patio, hunched over his laptop. When he sees me, he snaps it shut.

“Where have you been?” he asks.

I’ve been so busy agonizing about him that it didn’t occur to me that he should have been agonizing aboutme,too. I didn’t come back to the hotel last night. My phone was dead. He should be panicked. Hell, he should be filing a missing-person report by now.

But he isn’t. He’s…mildly concerned, if anything.

“Now you care?” I ask.

“What do you mean?”

“I was away all night.”

He frowns.

“I looked all over for you,” he says, defensive. “I asked Catalina if she knew where you’d gone. She said you took a car into town. Your stuff was still here, so I knew you hadn’t left. And your phone was going straight to voice mail.”

“It’s dead.”

“Well, if you charge it, you’ll see that I tried to call you a dozen times.”

Something about his tone, his cool rationality, sends me over the edge.

“All night!” I shout. “You didn’t think that something might have happened to me?”

He rubs his forehead.

“Why are you yelling at me?”

Because I don’t understand anything you’re doing, and it’s starting to scare me.

Gabriel spares me from having to respond. “We need to talk, anyway. I mean, there’s something I need to tell you.”

He stands and sets his laptop down on his chair.

“The police,” he says. “They…Do you want to sit down?”

I shake my head.

“I already know.”

“You do?” he asks.

“The person of interest thing?”

He nods.

“I saw it in the paper,” I say.

His mouth sets in a resigned line.

“I saw it online,” he says.

I whisper: “This is so fucked.”

---