Page 47 of Our Last Resort

He’s talking to Gabriel, not me. I open my mouth, but he cuts in: “Like I said, we’re going to want to talk to everyone. A lot of guests have already volunteered to speak to us.”

I try to catch Gabriel’s gaze.Don’t do it,I yell at him mentally.Not like this. Not without a lawyer. Maybe not ever.

“It’s fine,” Gabriel says.

He puts a hand on my shoulder. It does nothing to reassure me. I don’t trust it, this part of us, childlike, raised to believe in compliance.

“I’ll ping you when we’re done,” Gabriel tells me.

It took me years after Annie’s death to grasp the boldness of Gabriel’s decision to talk to the police—by himself—three different times. It was reckless. We didn’t know it at the time, but it was. He did everything he wasn’t supposed to do, and he got lucky.

Maybe he learned all the wrong lessons from those three interrogations. Maybe he emerged with an unearned, dangerous confidence.

Through the closed door, I hear him—or maybe it’s Harris—dragging our desk chair across the floor. I picture the two of them sitting down, one on the chair, the other at the end of a bed. Harris looking at Gabriel. My brother’s face like a puzzle he’s trying to solve. In his eyes, a million possibilities.

16The Only Town We Knew, Plus a Three-Mile Radius Around It, Hudson Valley

Eighteen Years Ago

Twenty minutes. That’s how long Gabriel said we could stay out the first time.

“But how do we do it?” I asked. “How do we leave?”

Gabriel hid his mouth behind a pamphlet. We were back in the packing room, where he had first brought up the possibility of outside-outside.

“We just…go,” he said.

I didn’t understand. His expression was patient, like he had experienced the same confusion and was prepared to walk me through it.

“There’s no fence,” he explained. “No locks or anything. We can just…go.”

The only thing was timing. You had to wait for the weekend, after lunch. The mothers did laundry then. Émile retreated to his office or had meetings with the three or four women he kept as his entourage. There was a lull, an opportunity.

The possibility was right there. It had always been.

We met up the next day behind the communal showers. No one ventured there in the middle of the day.

Gabriel raised his eyebrows at me.Ready?

I nodded. While all the girls were busy with chores, I’d retrieved Émile’s cash from the hole I’d torn in my mattress.

“Let’s go,” Gabriel said.

We walked. That was what leaving looked like: walking, and walking some more. No running. It had to look natural. Easy. We had to look innocent.

First there was the edge of Émile’s world. Then a small stretch of road—no sidewalk, just two lanes of asphalt, untamed brush and trees on each side.

Soon enough, we came to a fork in the road.

“Simon said turn left, then right,” Gabriel said.

So we did.

Émile’s shadow lurked in every corner. Whenever I looked up, I expected to find him there, staring at us, a look of irreparable betrayal on his face. Every gust of wind was his hand trying to bring us back, every blade of grass the punishing fingers of a mother around our ankles.

How much time had elapsed?

I’d expected we’d know what twenty minutes felt like. Our days were so regimented. There was an assigned duration to each of our tasks: thirty minutes to package those pamphlets, forty to clean the entire cafeteria. But time outside-outside moved differently.

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