“I should have come to see you. In the hospital,” he said.
“You had a lot to deal with,” Emma said.
“I think there’s a line about the pot and the kettle that might apply here,” he told her, smiling slantwise in a way that didn’t temper the sorrow in his eyes. She wanted to kiss him. She had wanted to kiss him since she was sixteen years old. The timing had never been worse.
“Have they found him yet?” she asked.
“A few hours ago,” he said. “Just bones, but they think it’s him.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me, too. But it’s been a long time. I might not have known exactly when or how he died, but I knew he was gone,” Gabriel said. “Maybe I’d be angrier if your father wasn’t already dead, and Hadley wasn’t—well. I don’t know if there’s any of him left in there, but I doubt he’s happy if there is.”
“You think he got what he deserved?” Emma asked.
“He killed at least four people,” Gabriel said.
“What if he didn’t?”
“What if he didn’t kill my father? Whether he pulled the trigger or not, I think the difference is pretty academic at this point,” Gabriel said.
“No. I mean the rest,” Emma said, forcing herself to look at him. She knew the lines of his face, the contours, every fleck of color in his eyes. She didn’t need more than moonlight to read his expression. “What if he didn’t kill my parents? What if he didn’t kill Nathan?”
“Then who did?” Gabriel asked. She didn’t answer. She couldn’t. Not yet, at least—not until she was sure what that answer should be. Gabriel didn’t let the silence last long. When he spoke, it was carefully, each word like a bead slipped onto a string. “I think the way things are right now, people have a story that finally makes sense. Three mysteries with one answer. You start picking that apart, and none of it is going to feel as solid.”
It was what Daphne had given them—a way out. Rick Hadley was not an innocent man. He was not a good man. He had killed Kenneth Mahoney, slept with his best friend’s wife, hounded Emma and her sisters relentlessly. He would have killed them by the river, Emma thought—he had no way out with them alive. Once he knew where the drive was, they would have died.
Rick Hadley got what he deserved.
And Nathan?
She wasn’t sure how much she believed Daphne’s version of what had happened. That she’d only grabbed the gun because he was pointing it at her; that shooting him had been more an accident than anything else.
But all the things Nathan had said about her, all the things he’d been planning? That, she believed.
“Can I tell you a secret?” Emma asked. She sounded young, she thought. She sounded sixteen again.
“You can tell me,” he said.
“I don’t think I loved my husband,” Emma said. It was, finally, the reason she could never figure out when she’d fallen in love with him. The simplest answer possible, really, but she’d convinced herself otherwise—had stopped even asking the question. “I know that’s awful. He’s dead. He didn’t deserve it.”
“Love? Or dying?” Gabriel asked.
“Maybe neither,” Emma said.
“I think…” Gabriel said slowly, “I think that you should consider what it is that you deserve, Emma. What you want.”
What did she want?
The same things she always had, she thought. Her sisters. A home she wasn’t afraid of. A life spent without looking over her shoulder.
The boy who had never treated her like an intruder, even when she felt like one.
She got down from the table. She approached Gabriel with steps as careful and intentional as his words, and took his hand. There, in the dark, she looked at him, meeting his gaze steadily. And then she rose on the tips of her toes and pressed her lips to his.
The kiss lasted only a moment. His hand on her waist, her thumb against his jaw. Then she sank back down. “I have to go,” she said.
“Emma.” She didn’t understand how her name on his lips could have that kind of power, to mean a thousand things at once. It was a question, an invitation, a plea.
“We keep getting the timing wrong,” she said, stepping away.
“Maybe next time,” he told her.
“Next time,” she echoed. She turned and slipped away into the dark. She drove home carefully, along the winding roads with their blind turns and dark stretches between the homes. You paid a premium for privacy on this side of Arden Hills, for the luxury of secrets.