The Man Who Looked Like Gabriel

For three weeks, Adrian worked.

He signed contracts. He sat through meetings. He ate nothing and slept less, and the whole house echoed around him like a seashell, a hollow, listening thing. He didn't call Santa Barbara. He had forbidden himself that. Every morning, Marcus reported in a neutral voice that the young master was eating, was exercising, was reading. Every morning, Adrian said *good*, and went back to the paperwork, and felt another small piece of himself go quiet.

On the twenty-second day, Marcus knocked on the study door with a strange look on his face.

"Sir. Word came back from Newport."

"What word?"

"One of our contacts at the harbor. Somebody spotted a man there." Marcus hesitated. "He looks just like Gabriel."

The pen stopped moving.

Adrian did not look up. For a long time he did not move at all.

"No," he said at last. His voice was very calm. "It's been eight years. Plenty of people have been mistaken."

"Yes, sir. I told him that. But he was very certain. He's a barber. He owns a small shop near the water."

"Don't get your hopes up, Marcus."

"No, sir."

Adrian laid the pen carefully down on the blotter. His hand had begun to shake, and he flattened it against the desk until it stopped.

"It's just a man who looks like him," he said to the empty room. "One look. One check. That's all."

---

Newport in late October was gray and gold and smelled of salt. The shop sat on a narrow street above the harbor, a small clapboard building with faded blue trim and a hand-painted sign swinging over the door: *JAY'S CUTS.* A bell tinkled as Adrian stepped inside.

It was the smell he noticed first. Bay rum and talcum and clean leather. Then the warmth, the low hum of a radio, the mismatched chairs and the black-and-white photographs of fishing boats. And then, in the mirror, a man bent over the head of an elderly customer, working his scissors with the unhurried ease of long practice.

"Welcome," the man said, without looking up. "A haircut?"

Adrian could not answer.

It was Gabriel.

Older. Thinner. His hair was cropped short and shot with gray at the temples, and a long white scar ran from his left ear down into the collar of his shirt. There were new lines around his eyes. But the shoulders, the way he tilted his head, the half-smile at the corner of his mouth: they were all the same. The hands especially. Adrian would have known those hands anywhere.

"Jay!" A woman's voice called from the back. "Come out here, there's a customer—"

"No need," Adrian said. It came out hoarse.

The man glanced up, polite and friendly. Hazel eyes, warm and a little tired. No recognition at all. "Are you the owner?" Adrian asked, and he was horrified to hear the question.

"I am." A pleasant smile. "Is that all right?"

"Sure."

"Sure. Have a seat. I'll be done with him soon."

Adrian sat. He stared at the empty chair, the checkered floor, the mirror, anywhere but at the man in the glass. When it was his turn, he settled into the leather seat and let the cape fall around his shoulders. The scissors began to snip, quick and light. The man's fingers brushed Adrian's temple, his nape.

"What's wrong?" the barber asked. "Hair in your eye?"

Adrian blinked furiously. "Yes," he said. "Hair in my eye."

---

He stayed in Newport for four days.

He told himself it was surveillance. He took a room above a chandler's shop. He walked the docks. He watched, from a distance, the man everyone called Jay close up at sunset, whistle off-key, lock his door with a battered brass key. The man bought bread from the same baker every morning. He fed a one-eyed stray cat on the back step. He laughed with the old fishermen, and when he laughed he looked ten years younger.

On the fourth afternoon, a woman screamed.

Adrian was crossing the harbor road with a paper cup of coffee when a motorcycle shot past, engine whining, and a rider in a black helmet tore a gold chain from the neck of a girl on the curb. She stumbled back with a cry. "My necklace!"

Someone was moving beside Adrian before he could blink: a flash of gray sweater, a long stride. Jay vaulted onto a parked motorbike at the curb, kicked it to life, and shouted over his shoulder.

"You! The tall one in the coat. Hop on!"

Adrian was on the bike before he had finished thinking.

"Hold on tight!" Jay yelled. The street dissolved into a roaring blur. "Fall off, and I won't turn back to pick you up!"

*That's what he always said*, Adrian thought wildly, with his arms around that lean waist and the wind tearing at his hair. *Every time. Every single time.*

"Not scared!" he shouted.

"Good!"

They ran the thief down on the pier. It wasn't much of a fight. The man jumped off his bike with a knife, and Jay moved in low and fast, wrist locked, elbow driven up under the jaw, a rolling throw that put the thief face-first into a stack of crab pots. Adrian simply stepped in and took the knife away. When it was done, they stood panting on the planks, half a dozen fishermen applauding from the shadows.

Jay turned to him, grinning, rubbing his shoulder.

"Didn't expect *you* to fight like that," he said.

"You taught me most of those moves," Adrian said, before he could stop himself. "Back then."

The grin faltered. "I did?"

"Not as good as you."

"No." Jay laughed ruefully and shook out his arm. "No. These past two years I can't fight like I used to. Old scars." He looked at Adrian more closely then, head tilted, the way he used to look at a puzzle he was too stubborn to give up on. "Do I know you?"

"No," Adrian said.

"You said *back then*."

"It was a slip of the tongue."

"Huh." The barber studied him for a long moment. Then he shrugged and slung an arm around Adrian's shoulders with the casual warmth of a man who had no reason in the world to be careful. "Come on. I owe you a drink."

---

They sat on the sea wall with two bottles of beer and watched the sun sink behind the masts.

"I don't think I've told you," Jay said, after a while. "You look a lot like my brother."

Adrian nearly choked. "Your brother."

"Not by blood. I don't actually know if I had any." He shrugged. "But a man I knew once. He was my best, best friend. Closer than blood, I think." He frowned at the horizon. "I can't remember his name. Just his face. Just that he was always there."

"Where is he now?"

"No idea. I don't even know how old I am." He turned the bottle in his hands. "Thirty-nine, I guess. If he were still here, that's how old he'd be this year. And since we hit it off like this—" He smiled sideways. "Maybe I really am thirty-nine."

*He turned thirty-nine in March*, Adrian thought numbly. *He always hated March.*

"A few years ago," Jay went on, "I washed up on a shore. Half dead. Hurt all over. I didn't know my own name. A fisherman pulled me out of the water, and he and his wife nursed me for a year." He touched the scar on his neck. "I never thought about getting my memory back. At first I was too busy healing. No strength to wonder. And then I came here, built a life, and it just stopped mattering."

"You'd throw away your whole past?" The words burst out. "All the people. Everything. What if someone out there can't let you go?"

"I looked in a mirror once," Jay said, "and saw scars all over my body. And something in me felt—" He paused, searching. "It felt like it wasn't a life I liked. Isn't that funny? A man doesn't forget a life he loved." He took a swallow of beer. "Maybe fate has its reasons. I've already died once, friend. Coming back to life now might just be in the way."

The harbor bells rang across the water.

Adrian stared down at the steel band on his left hand and thought of a gold ring in a pocket, and a boy in a dark hallway, and a candle gutting itself on a desk.

"Do you mind," he said, very quietly, "if I say something that's none of my business?"

"Go ahead."

"I think you were loved. By a great many people. I think one of them has spent eight years in a house that's too quiet."

Jay was silent for a long moment.

"Maybe," he said at last, gently. "But that's a different man's life, isn't it? Not mine."

Adrian looked at the stranger in the amber light.

It was Gabriel's face. Gabriel's hands, Gabriel's voice, Gabriel's crooked smile. And behind them, like a tide going out, there was nothing: no memory, no weight, no debt. Just a man who had been given a second chance and had chosen, without knowing he was choosing, to take it.

*He doesn't owe me anything*, Adrian thought, and something in his chest eased, and ached, and let go. *And I don't owe him the rest of my life.*

"Thank you for the drink," he said.

"Any time." Jay clinked the neck of his bottle against Adrian's. "If you're ever through Newport again, come by."