Waiting for him to continue, all kinds of terrifying and unthinkable scenarios go through my head and my stomach twists into a tight coil. I grab the edge of the table to keep my hands from trembling.
The clear blue sea beyond the balcony shimmers like it’s trying to catch my attention, to send me a warning.
Gabriel sits beside me, fingers laced so tightly together they’ve gone white at the knuckles. Is he cooking up some lies he can feed me?
“Gabriel,” I whisper, my fingertips barely touching his shoulder. He flinches and a low moan tears out of him. “That night you went after Sadie, you disappeared for a long time. Where were you exactly?”
“I did something, Scarlett…” His voice splinters as he presses a fist to his mouth. A single tear cuts a path down his tannedface, disappearing into the stubble. “Something unforgivable. Judy will never…When she finds out the truth, she will never forgive me.”
“What happened?” I fold my arms across my chest as frustration builds up inside me, a volcano on the verge of exploding. “What did you do, Gabriel?”
“I hurt my little girl.”
THIRTY-SIX
GABRIEL
Six Months Ago
Watching my daughter’s disappointed eyes glint with unshed tears as she catches her father cheating on her mother, I know things will never be the same again.
I can’t believe I let it come to this. That it took being caught for me to wake up and see what a complete idiot I’ve been.
When Judy finds out, she will never forgive me. Not only for cheating on her, but for being unfaithful with Scarlett, her best friend. I made a terrible mistake.
Despite what I did, despite stepping out on my marriage, I love my wife more than anything. I cannot imagine a life without her.
The thing is, there’s a pulsing ache inside me that only quiets when someone needs me. It started the day I pushed Luke off that roof.
I’m a murderer, and I’ll live with that sin for the rest of my life. It will eat at me until my dying breath.
I wish I could press a button and go back. I should have let Luke take Sally, my ex, to the prom. He didn’t have to die for it.
After his death, my parents made me promise never to talk about it. They stopped me every time I came close to turning myself in. They told me I’d destroy my future and ruin them. Maybe even send them to prison for what they did to protect me.
So I lived the lie, we all did. We pretended it never happened.
But that day never left me. It stayed vivid and sharp in my mind, along with the fear that one day someone would find out. I never allowed myself to think about what would happen then.
Helping others became my way out. In the courtroom or outside it. It was the only way I knew how to atone for my crime without destroying myself.
I think that’s one of the reasons I fell in love with Judy. She was broken, and I wanted to fix her.
From the outside, she seemed confident, self-assured. But I noticed the details. The slight hunch in her shoulders. The way she barely lifted her feet when she walked. Small signs of uncertainty.
And when I looked into her eyes, I saw the shards of a broken past she never liked to talk about.
All she told me was that she was adopted by Jane Ellis, who had been in her early fifties at the time. She mentioned it almost too casually on our first date, lying beside me on a picnic blanket at an open-air cinema, after our first kiss. It was like she wanted to get it out of the way early so we could move on.
She said she couldn’t have wished for a better mother. But when I asked about who she was before the adoption, I felt her pull away. Just slightly. Enough for me to notice.
Shedidknow her biological parents. But she didn’t want to talk about them. She preferred the present and the future, not the past.
That wall never came down. Not during our years-long relationship. Not after I proposed.
But it didn’t matter. What mattered was that she needed me. Needed me to help her stand straighter, to erase the pain she carried.
When I slid the ring onto her finger, I promised her that. Even without words. What I didn’t expect was what came after.
