**
We sat at my kitchen table like strangers who shared a secret neither of us understood yet. I poured coffee out of habit.
He kept staring at his hands.
“I don’t even know where to start,” he said.
“Start with the fire,” I replied. “Start with why we buried you.”
His jaw tightened. He nodded once.
“It wasn’t an accident.”
The words landed heavy in the room.
“What do you mean it wasn’t an accident?” My voice came out sharper than I meant it to. “The report -”
“My mother controlled the report.” He swallowed. “The fireplace story. Dental records. All of it…They wanted me to get away from you, Sammie. They said you were beneath us.”
I shook my head slowly. “You’re telling me that they faked your death?”
“Yes.”
The kitchen felt smaller.
“How?” I asked. “There was a body, Gabe.”
He nodded. “There was a fire, and I was there. There were remains. But not mine. They identified it through dental records that could be… redirected. My parents got me out, but I did get burned in the process.”
I leaned back in my chair. “That’s not just manipulation…”
“I know, Sammie.”
“You let me think you were dead,” I said quietly.
**
My father, Neville, had never trusted the closed casket. He didn’t say it out loud, but I saw it in the way he watched Gabriel’s parents, Camille and Louis, at the funeral.
Afterward, he kept me busy at the shop, kept food on my plate, and kept my hands moving so my mind couldn’t drown.
When I married Connor, he didn’t smile in the photos. He hugged me and whispered, “You deserve real love, kid.” I thought he meant Connor.
Now I wondered if he meant Gabriel – and if he’d been carrying a secret he couldn’t put down.
**
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