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Gabe.
I couldn’t take my eyes off him, off his head, lolling backwards at a sick, unnatural angle that looked so profoundly dead, there was no way I could try to deny the reality of what had happened.
And yet. And yet his face was still Gabe. That strong, curved nose, like a Roman senator. Those cheekbones. The shape of his lips. The roughness of his beard, and the softness of the skin at the base of his neck. All of that was still Gabe, still the man I loved. But it was his dead body that I was looking at.
My legs were about to give out, and I groped my way to the sofa and pulled myself onto it, holding my knees to my chest and rocking, rocking. I was making a strange sound, I realized. Something halfway between a wail and a whimper and formed of Gabe’s name.
This couldn’t be true. It couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t. Not to Gabe—sweet, funny, capable Gabe, whose large, strong hands could pry off a stuck lid or splint a blackbird’s wing with equal dexterity. My Gabe, who could fix anything, mend anything, make even the most terrible day okay with one of his huge, all-encompassing hugs.
But there was no way even he could fix this.
I don’t know how long I sat there, staring at Gabe’s body, at the flickering computer lights reflecting back from the dark pool of blood. Ten minutes? Twenty? I was shaking uncontrollably, and horribly, unbearably cold.
But at last I got ahold of myself. I knew what I had to do—what I should have done the moment I walked in the door.
My hands were stiff and trembling as I felt in my backpack for my phone. I had it, I knew I did. I had booked the Uber on it, but it still took me a long time to find, and when I drew it out the screen was blank and dark.
I had to hold on to the wall as I made my way through to our little kitchen, where there was a phone charger. It took me three tries to get the USB lead into the socket, my hands were still shaking so much. Metal ground against metal, leaving reddish smears across the screen as I tried and failed and tried again. But at last it was in.
The start-up took a painfully long time, cycling through its various animations and logos, the brightness hurting my eyes.
And then my lock screen. I opened it up and pressed the phone icon.
I dialed 999.
And I waited.
When the operator came on the line, I wasn’t sure at first if I would be able to speak, but my voice, when it came out, was surprisingly steady.
“Police,” I said in answer to her questions. I swallowed. I had to keep it together. I had to keep it together. I had already left it too long. “And please hurry. My husband—he’s been murdered.”
The next few hours had the surreal, bright cadence of a waking nightmare. First came the sound of the sirens, screaming closer and closer. Then the emergency lights, saturating everything with a strange pulsing blue glow. Then the hammering on the door and the officers storming in. They asked questions that hadn’t even occurred to me. Was the house secure? Could anyone still be on the premises? Did Gabe have any enemies?
It seems strange to say it, but I hadn’t even considered that. Now, at the thought of someone hiding upstairs while I keened over Gabe’s body, I felt cold all over again. But whoever it was, they were long gone.
And as for the rest—of course Gabe didn’t have any enemies. Of course he didn’t. The idea was absurd. Everybody loved him—his friends, his clients, his family. Oh God, I had a sharp flashing image of trying to tell Gabe’s parents the news, and the realization of what had just happened rose up again, threatening to overwhelm me.
They took me upstairs, where a kind female officer helped me step out of my stiffening, blood-stained clothes and into clean, dry sweatpants, and then finally that same officer led me downstairs, shivering helplessly to where a police car was waiting.
As we passed through the hall—my hall—I turned my head and caught a glimpse of white-overalled forensics officers through the living room doorway. They had laid down mats across the floor and were setting up bright lights that illuminated everything with a horrible white glare.
For a brief moment the room seemed to spin on its axis. I looked away. I tried to breathe. I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other until I reached the door of the police car.
I don’t know how long I sat there in the back seat. I was shaking, in spite of the blanket someone had wrapped around me and the hot, dry air from the car heaters. Eventually someone came out and beckoned to the officer sitting beside me. She got out, and they had a low conversation, and then she climbed back in, this time into the driver’s seat, and twisted to speak to me.
“Jack, are you okay to come with us to the station? We won’t keep you too long, we just want to get everything clear while it’s fresh in your head.”
I nodded mutely. In truth it wasn’t okay. I couldn’t imagine anything I wanted to do less than go down there and live through the hideousness again and again and again. I wanted to crawl away into the darkness and scream into the night. I wanted to push past the officers in the hallway and cradle Gabe’s body in my arms and tell everyone to fuck off and leave us, leave us alone.
I wanted to drink until I passed out.
But I had to do this—for Gabe, if no one else. I knew the officer was right; there was a window of time for tracking down whoever had done this, and I’d already wasted precious minutes, maybe even hours, by going into shock in the living room.
Another officer, a much younger one, climbed into the seat beside her and turned around to introduce himself.
“Hi, Jack, I’m Detective Constable Miles. Thank you so much for coming down to the station. We’re going to make this as quick as we can, but we do want to make sure we’re not missing anything. Have you got everything you need?”
I nodded, though it wasn’t true. I had lost Gabe. He was the only thing I needed. Nothing else mattered.
