Page 14 of Our Last Resort

I won’t let that happen again.

Gabriel cracks open a bottle of water from our minibar. After a couple of gulps, he hands it to me.

I could have my own. The minibar is complimentary. Anytime we step out, it refills as if by magic. But there are habits you can’t rewrite. We didn’t have enough to eat, for so many years. And so we live like this. We clear our plates. We rewrap half-eaten granola bars. We tilt back bags of chips over our faces and hoover up the last remaining crumbs. At home, on the rare occasion Charlie declines to eat his breakfast, I pour his kibble back into the bag.

I drink from the same bottle as my brother and return it to the minifridge.

Gabriel sits at the edge of his bed. I do the same thing on my side, facing him, and bury my face in my hands.

“I need to talk to the cops,” I say through my cupped palms.

“What?”

He’s looking at me.

“About what I saw last night,” I say. “Sabrina and William. The police should know.”

“Oh. Yes.”

Something occurs to me. I look up from my hands.

“Hey. You didn’t see them? The Brenners?”

Gabriel frowns.

“Last night,” I say. “When I came back and you weren’t here. You were outside, right? Did you hear them at all?”

Something in Gabriel dims, and I know what he’s going to say next.

“Yeah,” he says. “I heard…something. Parts of it. I could tell people were fighting.”But.“I went in the opposite direction. Toward the lobby.”

Gabriel stares at his feet. A pink flush creeps up his cheeks.

“I didn’t want to get involved. I couldn’t. I try to avoid confrontation.” Gabriel runs a hand over the wrinkles in his T-shirt, where William Brenner’s fists clenched. “Well, when I can.”

I picture him: Gabriel, hazy with sleep, in sweatpants under the night sky. Voices rising from the darkness. His resolvefading. This is the Gabriel I know: always a little too scared to go it alone. Capable of big things, brave things, but only with someone at his side.

He looks up and bites the inside of his mouth. “I wish I’d paid more attention. Maybe I could have…I don’t know.”

His breath catches.

“We—” he starts. “Sabrina, we—”

His eyes glisten. He looks toward the window, away fromme.

Sabrina, wewhat?

Sabrina, we could have done something?

Sabrina, we could have saved her?

Or does he mean “we,” as in “Sabrina and I”?

I remember them interacting only once. It was on our first day at the hotel. Gabriel and I were walking from the pool to our suite. He bumped into Sabrina, or maybe she bumped into him. They stopped. They both apologized. There was no anger, no tension. In fact, they seemed friendly. I can still picture her, bringing her hand to the side of her head, brushing her hair clip with the tip of her fingers. How she traced the outline of the butterfly shape as she smiled at Gabriel, urging him not to apologize.No, no it was me, I wasn’t looking.

Gabriel pinches the bridge of his nose.

“What do you think happened to her?” he asks.

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