I was breathing evenly, but each time air exited my lungs, they seemed to shrink, and the next breath was harder won. I thought of the maps on Gabriel’s wall. Questions, I thought. Ask them.

“Are you looking for your brother,” I asked through clenched teeth, “or for his body?”

Gabriel stopped moving behind me, but just for an instant. “I could have left you down here.”

“You could have tried,” I returned. “Now, answer. You promised.”

I heard a faint scratching sound—not Gabriel and not me.

Bad things happen in the dark. Bad things happen to bad little girls.

Maybe I hesitated, or maybe Gabriel just sensed that he was on the verge of losing me. He started talking again and didn’t stop. “I never believed that Andrés just took off. I can buy that he might have wanted a weekend to himself, but if he didn’t come back, it was because he couldn’t. I used to think that something had happened to him—an accident. Maybe he was climbing and he fell. Or maybe he had one of those heart murmurs you read about, and he just dropped dead one day while he was out here exploring. Maybe he ran into the wrong predator.” There was a pause, a slight one. “It didn’t occur to me until much later that the predator could be human.”

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?”