Page 68 of Our Last Resort

We’ve known each other for most of our lives, and still, you keep me on my toes.

There’s no point in trying to explain any of this. He wouldn’t believe me.

I thought it was over, years ago. When the police closed the case. When Gabriel walked free. Even when he decided to start over on the other side of the country. I dropped him off at the airport and waved at him while he joined the TSA line and thought,Now we’ll put all this behind us.

But it’s not behind us. It’s in our skin cells, in our hair follicles, under our fingernails.

This case.

It never ends.

“You always treat it like a miracle,” Gabriel says, acerbic. “The fact that I wasn’t arrested. That I wasn’t charged or convicted.”

“Mistakes happen. Innocent people get charged all the time.”

“Do you think I don’t know that? But at the end of the day, I didn’t commit a crime, and I wasn’t convicted of one. That’s not a miracle. It’s just fair.”

I close my eyes.

Itdidfeel like a miracle when Gabriel walked free. Not because I thought he was guilty, but because in the world I know, innocence doesn’t bail you out; it just makes you easier to trap.

“I never thought you killed her,” I say, my voice low. “I swear. I just…have less faith in the system than you do, I guess.”

He scoffs.

“Remind me what you do for a living?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

He shakes his head.

“I just think the system has worked out for you. In some ways.”

Touché.

Gabriel has never verbalized it before, but I’ve intuited it for years—his resentment that I took to the real world much more easily than he ever did. That I made it work for me, when he kept bumping into walls.

And there it is. Lurking underneath it all, that poisonous notion—the idea that he would have been better off staying with Émile.

So many things wouldn’t have happened, if Gabriel had stayed.

He’s given up on closing the bathroom door. Instead, he’s standing in front of one of the bathroom sinks—“his” sink, the one on the left—and running the water.

“We can fix this,” I try. “If Harris asks me, I’ll tell him the same thing you did. I’ll say we were never out of each other’s sight. I’ll say I never saw you and Sabrina—”

“For fuck’s sake, Frida!” Gabriel’s voice shakes with fury. “I don’t need you to lie to the police. Don’t do it. Especially not for me.”

He reaches for something. I’m not sure what. His hand clips his toothbrush—electric, like mine. In the mess of the past nine years, one thing hasn’t changed: Gabriel and I are both obsessive about dental care. We didn’t get to see a dentist until we’d both reached the age of twenty-one. By then, our mouths had hatched a litany of problems that would take months (and hundreds of dollars we didn’t have) to fix. So now we don’t mess around.

Except Gabriel forgot his charger when he packed for this trip. We’ve been sharing mine. It falls to the floor, along with Gabriel’s toothbrush, in a clatter of plastic.

“Fuck!”

Gabriel kneels to pick up the pieces. I go to help him, but he stops me with an extended arm.

“I’ve got it.”

“It’s fine.”

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