Gabriel’s Confession
Gabriel's Confession
Gabriel
The greenhouse was my mother's first, and then it was no one's, and now it is hers without her knowing it.
I found her here three hours ago, curled into one of the wicker chairs with a textbook spread across her knees.
The book is old—veterinary pharmacology, the pages soft and yellowed, the spine cracked from years of use.
She told me once that she'd bought it at a library sale for fifty cents, back when she still believed she'd need it.
Now she reads it the way other people read novels.
For comfort. For escape. For the shape of a future that slipped through her fingers.
She didn't hear me come in. Her lips moved as she read, silent words forming and dissolving, and the afternoon light fell through the glass ceiling in golden shafts, catching the dust motes that drifted around her like snow.
The orchids bloomed behind her—my mother's orchids, still alive after all these years, still reaching toward the light like they hadn't noticed she was gone.
I stood in the doorway and watched her for longer than I should have.
That's become a habit. Watching her. I did it first through the window of the diner, sitting in my car with the engine off and the cold seeping through my jacket.
I told myself I was watching my father. I told myself I was trying to understand what he saw in her.
But that was a lie, and I knew it even then.
I was watching her because I couldn't look away.
She has a way of existing that makes the world feel less sharp.
Less dangerous. When I'm near her, the pressure in my chest eases—the constant, low-grade panic that comes from being a Mire, from carrying a name that means something terrible.
She doesn't ask me to be anything other than what I am.
She doesn't flinch when I talk about anatomy lab or the cadavers I've cut open or the way the dead smell like nothing else on earth.
She just listens. The way she listened to my father.
The way she listens to everyone who bleeds in her presence.
I didn't want to startle her. I knocked on the doorframe—soft, two raps—and she looked up.
"Gabriel." Her face changed when she saw me. Not the polite smile she gives the waitstaff at the diner, not the careful blankness she wears around my father. Something real. Something that made my heart beat faster.
"You're still here," I said. "I thought you'd left after breakfast."
"I was reading." She held up the textbook. "I didn't want to interrupt your father's calls. He seemed... busy."
"He's always busy."
"Yes." She marked her place with a torn piece of paper—a receipt, maybe, or a napkin—and closed the book. "But he's not always here. Not really. Even when he's sitting right across from me."
I sat down in the chair beside her. The wicker creaked under my weight, and the orchids rustled behind us, their petals brushing against the glass.
"You noticed that," I said.
"Everyone notices. They just don't say anything.
" She turned toward me, pulling her legs up onto the chair, wrapping her arms around her knees.
She was wearing jeans today—not the dress from dinner, not the apron from the diner.
Just jeans and a sweater and her hair loose around her shoulders.
She looked younger like this. More like the girl she would have been if the farm hadn't failed.
"What are you doing here? I thought you'd be studying. "
"I was. I couldn't concentrate."
"Why not?"
I looked at her. The light was gold on her face, picking out the freckles across her nose, the small scar on her chin that she said came from a barbed wire fence when she was twelve.
She was so beautiful. Not in the way the women in my father's world were beautiful—polished and painted and carefully constructed.
She was beautiful the way a storm was beautiful.
The way a wound was beautiful. The way something that mattered was beautiful.
"You," I said. "I couldn't concentrate because of you."
She didn't look away.
That was one of the things I loved about her—one of the things I was beginning to understand I would never stop loving. She didn't look away. When I said something too honest, too raw, too much, she stayed. She held my gaze. She let me be seen.
"Gabriel," she said. "You need to stop saying things like that."
"Why?"
"Because they make me want to believe them."
"They're true."
"True and believable aren't the same thing." She reached out and touched my hand—just a brush of her fingers against my knuckles, the same gesture she'd used in the diner a lifetime ago. "I've been lied to before. By people who sounded just as sincere as you."
"I'm not lying."
"I know." She pulled her hand back. "That's what scares me."
We sat in silence for a moment. The greenhouse hummed around us—the faint whir of the humidifier, the drip of water from the irrigation system, the soft rustle of leaves.
Outside, the sun was beginning to set, painting the sky in shades of orange and pink that bled through the glass like watercolors.
"Can I tell you something?" I asked.
"Of course."
"Something I haven't told anyone."
Her eyes met mine. Brown. Steady. The color of earth after rain.
"You can tell me anything."
I told her about my mother.
Not the version I told at dinner, the cleaned-up version, the one that made her death sound like something that happened to someone else.
I told her the real version. The one I kept locked in a box in the deepest part of my chest, wrapped in layers of shame and guilt and the kind of grief that never fully heals.
"She was sick for a long time," I said. "Not at first. At first, it was just...
tiredness. She'd fall asleep at the table.
She'd forget things. My father took her to doctors, specialists, people who charged more for a consultation than most families make in a year.
They ran tests. They ran more tests. And then they told us there was nothing they could do. "
"What was it?"
"A degenerative neurological condition. The kind that eats you from the inside out. They gave her six months. She lasted eight."
I stopped. The words were harder than I'd expected. They stuck in my throat like bones.
"I was eight years old. Nathan was twelve.
We watched her lose herself piece by piece.
First her memory—she'd call me by my father's name, or by names I didn't recognize.
Then her speech—she'd try to say something and the words would come out wrong, jumbled, like a radio tuned to the wrong station.
Then her body. She couldn't walk. Couldn't feed herself.
Couldn't do anything but lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and wait. "
My hands were shaking. I put them between my knees to still them.
"The night she died, I was sitting with her.
Nathan had fallen asleep in the chair across the room.
My father was... somewhere. On the phone, probably.
Handling something. And my mother opened her eyes—really opened them, for the first time in weeks—and she looked at me.
And she said my name. 'Gabriel.' Clear as anything. Like she'd never been sick at all."
I closed my eyes. I could still hear it. The sound of her voice. The way it cracked on the second syllable.
"I held her hand. And she died. Right there, while I was holding her hand. And I couldn't do anything. I was eight years old, and I'd spent eight months watching her die, and I couldn't do a single thing to stop it."
"Gabriel..." Monika's voice was soft, aching.
"I swore that day that I would become a doctor.
That I would learn everything there was to know about the human body, about disease, about the ways that things break and the ways they can be fixed.
I swore that no one else would have to watch someone they love die like that. Not if I could help it."
I opened my eyes. She was crying. Tears slid down her cheeks, silent and steady, and she didn't wipe them away.
"That's why you want to be a doctor," she said.
"That's why."
She reached for me then. Not tentative, not careful. She took my face in her hands and held me, her thumbs wiping away tears I hadn't realized I'd shed.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm so sorry, Gabriel."
"It wasn't your fault."
"No. But I'm sorry anyway. I'm sorry you had to go through that. I'm sorry you were alone."
"I'm not alone now."
She kissed me.
It was different from the first time. In the garden, under the snow, the kiss had been soft—hesitant, almost, like we were both afraid of breaking something.
This kiss was not soft. This kiss was hungry, desperate, the kind of kiss that came from a place of shared grief and understanding and the terrible, wonderful knowledge that someone else had seen the worst parts of you and hadn't run away.
I pulled her closer. She came willingly, her body pressing against mine, her hands tangling in my hair. The wicker chair creaked beneath us, and I didn't care. I didn't care if the whole mansion heard. I didn't care if my father walked in and saw.
I wanted her. I had wanted her since the first night I saw her through the diner window, and the wanting had only grown, spreading through me like a fever.
"Monika," I said against her mouth. "Monika."
"Gabriel." Her voice was breathless. "The glass—"
I stood up, pulling her with me, and walked her backward until her shoulders pressed against the glass wall of the greenhouse.
The orchids trembled behind her, their petals brushing against her hair.
The light was fading now, the sunset giving way to twilight, and the world beyond the glass was turning blue.
I kissed her again. Harder. Needier. My hands moved without permission—one on her hip, one on her waist, fingers digging into the soft fabric of her sweater. She made a sound against my mouth, a small gasp that sent blood rushing to places I was trying very hard not to think about.