Page 60 of Dearly Departed

It can’t be home.

Home isn’t a place where you can show up disheveled and sick and out of your mind. Home is where the facade lives. Home is where your shirt should be pressed and your smile should be firmly affixed to your face and your sharpest words should be ready at a moment’s notice for when your father appears to tell you in exacting detail how disappointing you are.

I know perfectly well that my father won’t pop out of one of Gabriel’s guest rooms with a bullet-pointed list of my various disloyalties and treacheries against the Chambers name. I know perfectly well that my father is in prison.

My inadequacies haunt me regardless. I don’t feel well. I’m dressed in sweatpants and a crew-neck sweatshirt. Yes, they’re made of cashmere, but they remain sweatpants and a crew-neck sweatshirt, and I’m wearing them because I couldn’t bear anything else. My heart aches constantly.

I can’t hide any of those things.

I can’t hide what I’ve become, which is worse than a wreck. I’m not just a member of the moneyed elite having a breakdown. I’m having a breakdown because I’m a murderer who can’t handle the guilt.

How can these people—how can Gabriel—stand to look at me, much less have me inside the same house?

We end up in the living room. It’s very like Gabriel. He’s the kind of person who would renovate the house but insist on keeping the history intact, which is exactly what he’s done with his brownstone. He made something beautiful out of what was already there.

Gabriel is like his parents, who were the only good people in the consortium.

My parents were among the worst in the group.

My father didn’t hire the hitman directly. That was Bettencourt. But Catherine and her sisters had nothing to do with that. They suffered as much as any of the victims, if not more.

And what did I do?

I went to London. I hired Sophia Evans and went to society parties and handed off information without looking at it.

I was a greedy, selfish coward, just like my parents.

Which leaves me numb to the joy and relief in Gabriel’s living room and ridiculously sensitive to the wretched soreness all over my body and the fatigue that won’t let up and the constant background search for ways to avoid having to eat.

Everyone’s voices blur into one indistinguishable babble amid twinkling Christmas lights and pine garlands and all kinds of cheery red shit to remind us of the holiday we missed.

It went by without us.

There’s still a pile of presents under Gabriel’s tree.

Catherine’s hand slips out of mine. Elise and Lydia, her sisters, can’t stop touching her face and her hair. They hug her close, then lean back to make sure she’s all in one piece.

My wife drifts away, step by step, until her sisters have taken her across the hall.

Mason and Jameson, Gabriel’s brothers, come in for hugs that are far gentler than I deserve. Remy gets up on tiptoe to kiss my cheek and tell me she’s so glad we made it home, and Lily squeezes my hand. Charlotte kisses my cheek, too. Baby Robin bounces in her arms, pressing his face into her shoulder. Tired, I think.

I empathize with the feeling.

I don’t know what to say with the word home tolling in my head like a bell, so I just stand there, watching the Hills move around one another like a little solar system, bright and alive. One of the traveling nurses steps in and fusses over me. I’ve stopped paying attention to what they’re doing. Not because I’m ungrateful—although I still can’t fathom why people on a secret island base would be so invested in whether I live or die—but because if I think about it for longer than a minute or two I want to send them away and go gently into a good night.

A nightmare is probably more likely.

Images from the nightmare I had on the island come back to me in disjointed flashes. It went on forever, didn’t it? Days and days.

Maybe this is part of it. I can’t see Catherine, after all. I might never see her again.

“—home,” says Gabriel. He’s directly in front of me, and we’re alone in his living room. I didn’t notice everyone else stepping out. “Jacob?”

A long string of desperate apologies well up into my throat. I’ve apologized to him already, of course. For the things I did and the far more unforgivable things I didn’t do. I tried to keep apologizing through deeds and ended up getting myself and my wife trapped on an island with a murderer.

The difference between me and Gabriel Hill—one of many, many differences—is that the glow he has about him is real. He’s as good as he seems, and he of all people could be forgiven for spending the rest of his life angry and bitter and vengeful.

Instead, he’s engaged to Elise, and the two of them have guardianship of Lydia and Nate.