Page 48 of The Lovely and the Lost

Like the person who took Bella.The world around me was getting smaller. My fingernails bit into the palms of my hands as I pulled myself forward. My next question unwound inside me slowly, like a snake rising from coiled position. “Why were you arrested for kidnapping and assault?”

The question had teeth. To Gabriel, it probably seemed like it came out of nowhere, but in my mind, it was all tangled together: Gabriel and his brother, the missing persons reports, Bella, the sheriff.

“Been talking to the law?” Gabriel asked me, his voice echoing in close space.

“Is that your way of deflecting the question?”

He’d promised me not to deflect—and he knew it. As long as I kept going, he’d keep talking. He’d promised.

“When Andrés disappeared, I could have gone off the rails. Instead, I got my act together. I spent every spare second I could out on the mountain, looking for my brother, but I also made varsity soccer, joined the debate team, started pulling straight As. My mother had just remarried. I thought her husband was a good guy. I thought that if I was that kind of guy, people would believe me when I told them that Andrés hadn’t just left.”

The muscles in my arms were starting to ache.

“The joke was on me, though. My good-guy stepfather was the one who convinced my mother to stop looking for Andrés. He almost convinced me.”

“Almost?”

“My mom and my stepdad had a baby. The novelty of a newborn wore off for thatgood guypretty fast. Five weeks in, my mom was barely sleeping, and my stepfather would look at the dishes in the sink or bang around making himself dinner and say that if she would just be a littlesmarterabout how she handled things, she wouldn’t be falling down on the job. My sister had colic. He thought that was my mom’s fault, too.”

I could hear Gabriel grinding his teeth. As the first shard of light became visible at the end of the tunnel, I ground mine as well.

“I got used to him making my mother cry. Every time that it happened, he’d tell her—and me—that she had postpartum depression. She didn’t, but he didn’t want to admit that it was something he’d said or something he’d done that had upset her. He’d start talking about how she was emotionally unstable, about how maybe she couldn’t be trusted with my baby sister because she was so illogical and irresponsible and erratic. He said it often enough that she started to believe it, and when he told her she was failing as a wife, she believed that, too.”

Gabriel was breathing more heavily now. Every once in a while, his arm would brush my leg.

“He never hit her,” Gabriel said.

The end of the tunnel was close—five feet away, or six.

“He never hit me, but he did like slamming things around. Punching walls, right next to her face. If they were fighting and the baby started crying, he wouldn’t let my mother leave the room. He’d stand in the doorway and block her when she tried to go, telling her that if she wasn’t such a horrible excuse for a mother, maybe my sister would be sleeping through the night.”

We were almost out now.

“One day, she said something he didn’t like, and he threw a glass into the wall. It shattered. A shard hit my mother’s arm. Another camethisclose to my infant sister’s face.” Gabriel paused, ever so slightly. “I snapped.”

I didn’t need to ask what that meant. It meant the same thing it would have if someone had threatened Cady and Jude in front of me.Attack.

Assault.

The muscles in my neck and stomach tensing, I rolled over to my back and pulled my upper body out of the tunnel. I placed my palms beside my legs, braced, and lowered them to the ground. I was out. I was through.

Fresh air had never tasted so good. The muscles in my chest loosened, and I breathed in hungrily—again and again, like a drowning man who’d made it up for air.

“So that’s the assault charge.” Gabriel made it out and rose to his full height beside me. He examined a cut on the heel of his hand. “I clocked the guy, knocked him out. I was in a bad situation, and I made a bad choice. Pretty sure I’d make it again. Just between you and me? Part of me even enjoyed it.” He paused. “Would you like to hear about the kidnapping charge next?”

“Your sister?” I guessed. He’d said that she was a baby, that she was there, that she was almost hurt. I wondered if he’d meant to take her for good, or if he’d just wanted to get her out of the house.

“She’s almost four now,” Gabriel said quietly. “I’m supposed to stay away from her—and my mother. That was part of the deal I struck with the DA. I pleaded guilty to assault, they dropped the kidnapping charge, and my mother didn’t have to testify.”

“But if your mother had testified—”

He cut me off, his brown eyes capturing mine. “She wasn’t going to testify onmybehalf.”

I blinked back against the sun and managed one last question, though now that we were out, he was under no obligation to answer.

“The sheriff, he was the one who arrested you?”

No answer.