Page 130 of Our Last Resort

She took a deep breath, then held it for a couple of seconds before exhaling.

“Last night,” she said, “after he came home, he was talking. None of what he was saying made sense, at first.”

“Okay…”

“Then he started repeating this one thing. I couldn’t hear him—he was on the bed, half talking into a pillow. And then I thought I’d misheard him. But no.”

Annie was staring blankly above my shoulder. There was something desperately searching in her gaze, like she was looking for a marker at sea.

“He was saying…It sounded like…No, it didn’t just sound like it. That’s what he was saying:‘I killed her…I killed her…’ ”

I stopped breathing. Stopped thinking. Stopped doing anything but sitting there, listening to Annie.

I killed her.

I killed her?

“I mean, it sounds like he was wasted,” I said, my voice wobbly.

“No,” Annie said. “I mean, yes, he was, but it sounded so…real. Like it was coming from somewhere deep, you know?”

She held up a finger.

“And then he started saying something else. A name. ‘Edwina, Edwina’…Just over and over again.”

Gabriel.

Fucking hell.

Don’t you know? That people like us don’t get to get wasted? That we need to know what we’re saying and who we’re saying it to, at all times?

But it was unfair to think that way. Whatever was happening to Gabriel, he wasn’t choosing it. If anything,Edwinawas the reason he was drinking so much.

Annie reached into her purse—chic, olive-green leather with golden metal embellishments.

“We don’t know an Edwina,” she said, riffling through her things. “It’s such an odd name. It got me thinking.”

From her beautiful handbag, Annie pulled out a sheet of printer paper.

“I remembered reading something, years ago,” she said. “It was in a newspaper, but I found the article on the internet.”

Annie held the sheet in my direction, clearly waiting for me to take it.

I stepped off my barstool.

I don’t remember walking toward her or grabbing the sheet of paper.

What I do remember is the feeling, like falling from a great height.

At the top of the sheet of paper was the headline, a scream from the past:

One Dead in “Cult” Blaze

And underneath it, every word, every punctuation mark, exactly as I remembered:

One person is dead and another is injured after a fire devastated part of the compound of a reclusive organization some have described as a cult.

My eyes scanned the rest of the page. I didn’t want to look up at Annie. Didn’t want this moment—this moment when I was looking at the piece of paper in my hand—to end. Whatever would come next, I wanted no part in it.

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