He had a ten-year-old La Marzocco espresso machine that was still sitting in its box. And he was married once before. He was married to a woman whose father defended bad men—even if he thought it was a little simplistic to call them bad men, even if he thought it was incomplete. He accepted his father-in-law’s work because he was married to this man’s daughter and that’s who Owen was. Owen accepted his father-in-law out of need, out of love, and maybe out of fear. Though he wouldn’t have named it as fear. He would have named it, incorrectly, as loyalty. Here’s what else I know. When Owen lost his wife, it all changed. Every single thing changed. Something broke open in him. And he became angry. He became angry with his wife’s family, with her father, with himself. He was angry about what he’d allowed himself to turn a blind eye to—in the name of love, in the name of loyalty. Which is part of the reason why he left. The other reason is that he needed to get Bailey away from that life. It was primal and it was urgent. Keeping Bailey anywhere near his wife’s family felt like the greatest risk of all. Knowing all that, here’s what I may never know. If he’ll forgive me for what I feel like I have to risk now.
The Never Dry, Part Two The Never Dry is open now. There is a mix of the after-work crowd, a few graduate students, and a couple on a date—spiky green hair for him, tattoo sleeve for her—completely focused on each other. A young, sexy bartender in a vest and a tie holds court behind the bar, pouring the couple matching manhattans. A woman in a jumpsuit eyes him, tries to get his attention for another drink. She tries, simply, to get his attention. And then there’s Charlie. He sits alone in his grandfather’s booth, drinking a glass of whisky, the bottle resting beside it. He runs his nger along the glass, looking lost in thought. Maybe he’s playing it back in his head, what happened between us earlier, what he could have done di erently when he met this woman he didn’t know and his sister’s daughter whom he only wanted to know again. I walk up to his table. He doesn’t notice me standing there, at rst. When he does, instead of looking at me with anger, he looks at me in disbelief. “What are you doing here?” he says. “I need to talk to him,” I say. “Who?” he says. I don’t say anything else, because he doesn’t need me to clarify. He knows exactly who I’m talking about. He knows who I’m angling to see. “Come with me,” he says. Then he stands up and steers me down a dark hallway, past the restrooms and the electrical closet, to the kitchen. Charlie pulls me into the kitchen, the door swinging closed behind us.
“Do you know how many cops have come in here tonight? They’re not asking me anything yet, but they’re coming in so I can see them. So I’ll know they’re here. They’re all over the place.” “I don’t think they’re cops,” I say. “I think they’re U.S. marshals.” “Do you think this is funny?” he says. “None of it,” I say. Then I meet his eyes. “You had to tell him we were here, Charlie,” I say. “He’s your father. She’s your niece. You’ve both been looking for her since the day he took her away. You couldn’t keep that to yourself, even if you wanted to.” Charlie pushes open the emergency door, which leads to a back staircase and the alley below. “You need to leave,” he says. “I can’t do that,” I say. “Why not?” I shrug. “I have nowhere else to go.” It’s true. In a way I’m uncomfortable acknowledging to myself—let alone to him—Charlie is the only shot I have left to make this okay again. Maybe he senses that because he pauses, and I see him falter in his resolve. He lets the emergency door close. “I need to talk to your father,” I say. “And I’m asking my husband’s friend to help make that happen.” “I’m not his friend.” “I don’t think that’s true,” I say. “I had my friend Jules nd Ethan’s will for me.” Ethan, using that name. “His real will. And he put you in it. He put you in it as a guardian for Bailey, along with me. He wanted her to have you if anything ever happened to him. He wanted her to have me and he wanted her to have you.” He nods slowly, taking this in, and for a second I think he is going to start crying. His eyes water, his hands move to his forehead, pulling on his eyebrows, as if trying to stop the tears. These tears of relief that there is a window open to his seeing his niece again—and tears of utter sadness that seeing her for the last decade has been an impossibility.
“And what about my father?” he says. “I don’t think he wants her to have anything to do with Nicholas,” I say. “But the fact that Ethan put you in there lets me know that my husband trusted you, even if you seem pretty con icted about that.” He shakes his head, like he can’t believe this is his reality. It’s a feeling I can relate to. “This is an old battle,” he says. “And Ethan isn’t innocent. You think he is. But you don’t know the whole story.” “I know I don’t.” “So what do you think? That you’re going to talk to my father and broker some peace between him and Ethan? It doesn’t matter, nothing you say matters. Ethan betrayed my father. He destroyed his life and ended my mother’s life in the process. And if there’s nothing I can do to mend this, then there’s nothing you can do either.” Charlie is struggling. I see it. I see him struggling with what to tell me about his father, what to tell me about Owen. If he o ers up too little, I won’t walk away from him. Maybe I won’t walk away if he says too much either. And he wants me to walk away. He thinks it’s better for everybody if I do. But I am playing past that. Because I know there is only one way to make things better now. “How long have you been married to him?” he says. “To Ethan?” “Why does that matter?” “He’s not who you think he is.” “So I keep hearing,” I say. “What has Ethan told you?” he says. “About my sister?” Nothing, I want to say. Nothing I know to be true. She doesn’t, after all, have erce red hair or love science. She didn’t go to college in New Jersey. She may very well not know how to swim across a pool. I know now why he told us all those things—why he made up such an elaborate backstory. It was so, on the o chance the wrong person ever approached Bailey, if the wrong person ever suspected Bailey of being who she actually was, she’d be able to look that person in the eye and honestly deny it. My mother is a redheaded swimmer. My mother is nothing like the person you think I belong to.
I meet Charlie’s eyes, answer honestly. “He hasn’t told me much. But he once told me how much I would have liked her,” I say. “He told me we would have liked each other.” Charlie nods, but he stays quiet. And I can feel all the questions he has about my life with Owen, all the questions about Bailey: about who she is now and what she likes now and how she may still be a little like his lost sister, who he clearly loved. But he can’t ask any of those questions, not without elding questions of his own, questions for which he doesn’t want to provide answers. “Look,” he says, “if you want someone to tell you that there’s enough goodwill because of Kristin that my father can get over what happened between him and Ethan, that they can reach some kind of truth, they can’t. He won’t. It doesn’t work like that. My father isn’t over it.” “I know that too,” I say. And I do know that. But I’m banking on the fact that Charlie wants to help me anyway. Or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. We’d be having a di erent conversation—a conversation neither of us wants to have about what Owen has done to this family. And to me. We’d be having a conversation that would break my heart wide open. He looks at me more gently. “Did I scare you earlier?” he says. “I should be asking you that.” “I didn’t mean to come at you the way I did. It was just that you surprised the hell out of me,” he says. “You wouldn’t believe how many people come here, stirring up trouble for my father. All these crime junkies who saw the trial coverage on Court TV, who think they know my father, who want autographs. Even all these years later. I think we’re on some criminal enterprise tour of Austin. Us and the Newton Gang…” “That sounds awful,” I say. “It is,” he says. “It’s all awful.” Charlie looks at me, taking me in. “I don’t think you know what you’re doing. I think you’re still hoping for a happy ending. But this story doesn’t end well,” he says. “It can’t.” “I know it can’t. I’m just hoping for something else.” “What’s that?”
I pause. “That it doesn’t end here.”
On the Lake Charlie drives. We head northwest of the city past Mount Bonnell and into Texas Hill Country. Suddenly I’m surrounded by rolling hills, trees and foliage everywhere, the lake muted outside the car windows, tepid. Unmoving. The rain abates as we turn down Ranch Road. Charlie doesn’t say much, but he tells me that his parents bought their Mediterranean estate nestled on the shores of the lake a couple of years ago—the year Nicholas got out of prison, the year before his mother died. This was his mother’s dream house, he says, this private retreat, but Nicholas has stayed there since her death, on his own. I learn later that it cost them a cool ten million dollars—this estate which, as I see on a plaque at the foot of the driveway, Charlie’s mother, Meredith, named THE SANCTUARY. It is easy to see why she has chosen this name. The estate is enormous, wildly beautiful, and private. Entirely private. Charlie enters a code and the metal gates open to reveal a cobblestone driveway, at least a quarter of a mile long, that slowly winds its way to a small guardhouse. The guardhouse is covered in vines, making it inconspicuous. The main house is less inconspicuous. It looks like it belongs on the French Riviera—complete with cascading balconies, an antique-tile roof, a stone facade. Most notable are the gorgeous bay windows running at least eight feet tall, welcoming you, inviting you in. We pull up to the guardhouse and a bodyguard emerges. He is pro-linebacker huge, dressed in a tight suit. Charlie unrolls the window as the bodyguard bends down, leans against the driver’s-side window. “Hiya, Charlie,” he says.
“Ned. How you doing tonight?” Ned’s eyes move in my direction and he gives me a small nod. Then he turns back to Charlie. “He’s expecting you,” he says. He taps on the car’s hood and then goes back into the guardhouse to open a second gate. We pull through it, drive onto the circular driveway, and stop by the front door. Charlie puts the car in park and shuts o the ignition. But he doesn’t move to get out of the car. It seems he wants to say something. He must change his mind though—or think better of it—because, without a word, he opens the driver’s- side door and gets out. I follow his lead and step out of the car into the cool night, the ground slick from the rain. I start walking toward the front door, but Charlie points to a side gate. “This way,” he says. He holds the gate open for me and I walk through it. I wait as he locks the gate behind himself and we start heading down a pathway that runs along the side of the house, succulents and plants lining the path’s edges. We walk side by side, Charlie on the path’s outer edge. I look into the house —look through those long, French windows—to see room after room, every one of them lit up. I wonder if it’s all lit up for my bene t—so I can see how impressive the design is, how every detail has been considered. The long, winding hallway is lined with expensive art, with black-and-white photographs. The grand room has cathedral ceilings and deep wooden couches. And the farmhouse kitchen, which wraps around the back of the house, is accented with a terra-cotta oor and an enormous stone replace. I keep thinking how Nicholas lives here alone. What is it like to live in a house like this alone? The pathway winds around to a checkered veranda, which displays antique pillars and a breathtaking view of the lake—small boats twinkling in the distance, a canopy of oak trees, the cooling calm of the water itself. And a moat.
This house, Nicholas Bell’s house, has its own moat. It’s a stark reminder that there is no getting in or out of here without explicit permission. Charlie points at a row of chaise lounges, sitting down in one himself, the lake glistening in the distance. I avoid meeting his eyes, staring out at the small boats instead. I know why I needed to come here. But now that I’m actually here, it feels like an error. Like I should have heeded Charlie’s warning, like nothing good is waiting inside. “Take a seat anywhere,” Charlie says. “I’m ne,” I say. “He could be a little while,” Charlie says. I lean against one of the pillars. “I’m okay standing,” I say. “Maybe it’s not you that you should be worrying about…” I turn at the sound of a male’s voice, startled to nd Nicholas standing in the back doorway. He has two dogs by his side, two large chocolate Labradors. Their eyes hold tightly on Nicholas. “Those pillars aren’t as strong as they look,” he says. I step away from the pillar. “Sorry about that,” I say. “No, no. I kid, I just kid with you,” he says. He waves his hand as he walks toward me, his ngers slightly crooked. This thin man with a struggling goatee—frail-looking with those arthritic ngers, his loose- tting jeans, his cardigan sweater. I bite on my lip, trying to hold my surprise in check. This isn’t the way I expected Nicholas to look—soft, gentle. He looks like someone’s loving grandfather. The way he talks so softly—with the slow cadence, the dry humor —he reminds me of my own loving grandfather. “My wife bought those pillars from a monastery in France and had them shipped here in two pieces. A local artisan put them back together, returning them to their original presentation. They’re plenty sturdy.” “They’re also beautiful,” I say. “They are beautiful, aren’t they?” he says. “My wife had a real air for design. She picked everything that went into this house. Every last thing.” He looks pained, even speaking of his wife.
“I don’t make it a habit of talking about the workmanship of my home, but I thought you’d appreciate a little history…” he says. This stops me. Is Nicholas trying to suggest he knows what I do for a living? Could he know? Could there be a leak already? Or maybe I’m the leak. Maybe I said something to Charlie without realizing it. Something that has given us all away. Either way, Nicholas is in charge now. Ten hours ago, that might not have been the case. But I changed all of that when I arrived in Austin. And now it’s Nicholas’s world. Austin is Nicholas’s world, and I’ve walked us back into it. As if cementing the point, two bodyguards walk outside—Ned and another guy. Both of them are large and unsmiling. Both of them stand right behind Nicholas. Nicholas doesn’t acknowledge them. Instead he reaches out his hands to take mine. Like we are old friends. What choice do I have? I put my hand out, let him wrap his palms around mine. “It’s a pleasure to meet you…” he says. “Hannah,” I say. “You can call me Hannah.” “Hannah,” he says. He smiles—genuine and generous. And suddenly I’m more disturbed by that than I am by the idea of him presenting as the opposite. At what point was Owen standing in front of him thinking, Nicholas has to be good? How could he have a smile like that if he wasn’t? How could he have raised the woman who Owen loved? It’s hard to look at him so I look down, toward the ground, toward the dogs. Nicholas follows my eyes. Then he bends down, pets his dogs on the back of their heads. “This is Casper and this is Leon,” he says. “They’re gorgeous dogs.” “They certainly are. Thank you. I brought them here from Germany. We are in the middle of their Schutzhund training.” “Meaning what?” I say. “The o cial translation is ‘protection dog.’ They’re supposed to keep their owners safe. I just think they’re good company.” He pauses. “Did you want to
pet them?” I don’t think it’s a threat, but it also doesn’t feel like an invitation, at least not one I’m interested in accepting. I look over at Charlie, who is still lying down on his chaise lounge, his elbow covering his eyes. His casual pose seems forced, almost like he is as uncomfortable being at his father’s as I am. But then Nicholas reaches out, puts his hand on his son’s shoulder. And Charlie holds his father’s hand there. “Hey, Pop.” “Long night, kid?” Nicholas says. “You could say that.” “Let’s get you a drink then,” he says. “You want a scotch?” “That sounds great,” he says. “That sounds perfect.” Charlie looks up at his father, sincere and open. And I understand that I misread his anxiety. Whatever he’s feeling badly about, it doesn’t seem to be about his father, whose hand he still holds. Grady was apparently correct about that much—whoever Nicholas might have been in his professional life, however ugly or dangerous, he’s also the man that puts his hand on his grown son’s shoulder and o ers him a nightcap after a hard night at work. That’s who Charlie sees. It makes me wonder if Grady is right about the rest. Or, I should say, how right Grady is about the rest. That to stay safe—to keep Bailey safe—I should be anywhere but here. Nicholas nods toward Ned, who walks over to me. I inch and move backward, putting my hands up. “What are you doing?” I say. “He’s just going to make sure you’re not wearing a wire,” Nicholas says. “You can take my word for it,” I say. “What would I have to gain by wearing a wire?” Nicholas smiles. “Those are the type of questions I don’t get involved in anymore,” he says. “But if you wouldn’t mind…” “Raise your arms, please,” Ned says. I look toward Charlie to back me up—to say this is unnecessary. He doesn’t.
I do what Ned asks, telling myself that this is like a pat down at the airport, someone checking me out for the TSA. Nothing to think about. But his hands feel cold, and the entire time he moves them down my sides, I can see his gun on his hip. Ready to be used. And I can see Nicholas watching. The protection dogs by his side, apparently ready to be used too. I feel my breath catch in my throat, trying not to show it. If one of these men were to see my husband, they would hurt him. They would hurt him so badly that nothing I do now would matter. Grady’s voice runs through my head. Nicholas is a bad man. These men are ruthless. Ned steps away from me and motions to Nicholas, which I assume means I’m all clear. I meet Nicholas’s eyes, still feeling the bodyguard’s hands on my body. “Is this how you welcome all your guests?” I say. “I don’t tend to have many guests these days,” he says. I nod, straightening out my sweater, wrapping my arms around myself. Then Nicholas turns to Charlie. “You know what, Charlie? I’d like some time alone with Hannah. Why don’t you enjoy a drink by the pool? And head home.” “I’m Hannah’s ride,” he says. “Marcus will take her where she needs to go. We’ll talk tomorrow. Yeah?” Nicholas gives his son a nal pat. Then before Charlie can say anything, as if there is anything to say, Nicholas opens the doors to his house and walks inside. He pauses in the doorway though. He pauses in the doorway, leaving me with a choice to make. I can leave now and go home with Charlie or I can stay here alone with him. These are my choices—stay with Nicholas and help my family or leave my family and help myself. It feels like a weird test, as if I need to be tested, as if I haven’t already gotten to the place where helping my family and helping myself have become the same thing. “Shall we?” Nicholas says. I can still leave here. I can still leave him. Owen’s face is in my mind. He wouldn’t want me here. Grady’s face. Go. Go. Go. My heart races in my chest so
loudly that I’m sure Nicholas can hear it. Even if he can’t, I’m sure he can feel it —the tension coming o me. There is a moment when you realize you are out of your depth. This is mine. The dogs stare up at Nicholas. Everyone stares at Nicholas, including me. Until I move in the only direction I can. Toward him. “After you,” I say.
Two Years Ago “Bailey, I love your dress,” I said. We were in Los Angeles, having dinner at Felix, in Venice. I was working with a client on her house in the Venice Canals and Owen thought it would be a perfect opportunity for Bailey and me to spend some time together. This was probably the eighth time we’d met, but usually she tried to get out of doing more than just having a meal together. Usually, it wasn’t the three of us for a whole weekend. We took her to see Dudamel at The Hollywood Bowl, which she loved. And now we were having dinner at the best Italian restaurant in Los Angeles, which she also loved. The only thing she didn’t love? Doing it all with me there. “That shade of blue looks so pretty on you,” I said. She didn’t answer, didn’t even o er a rote head shrug. She ignored me, downing some of her Italian soda. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. And she was up, and gone, before Owen could answer. Owen watched her go. When she disappeared around the corner, he turned toward me. “I was going to surprise you,” he said. “But maybe this is a good time to tell you that I’m taking you to Big Sur next weekend.” I was staying in Los Angeles for the week to nish work on my project in the Canals and then I was planning on ying up to Sausalito on Friday. We had talked about taking a ride down the coast to visit cousins of Owen’s. The cousins, he said, lived in Carmel-by-the-Sea—a small, touristy town on the end of the Peninsula. “There aren’t actually cousins in Carmel-by-the-Sea?” I said.
“Someone’s cousins, probably,” he said. I laughed. “That’s a bene t of me,” he said. “I don’t really have any cousins anywhere. I don’t come with family at all, except Bailey.” “And she’s a boon,” I said. He smiled at me. “You really feel that way, don’t you?” “Of course.” I paused. “Not that the feeling is mutual.” “It will be.” He took a sip of his drink and moved it across the table toward me. “Have you ever tried a bourbon Good Luck Charm?” he said. “I only drink it on special occasions. It’s a mix of bourbon and lemon and spearmint. And it works. It brings luck.” “What do you need luck for?” “I’m going to ask you something that you’re going to say is too soon to ask you,” he said. “Is that okay?” “Is that the question?” I said. “The question’s coming,” he said. “But not like this, not when my kid’s in the bathroom, so you can start breathing again…” He wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t taken a breath at all, worrying he was actually going to pop the question. I was terri ed if he did that I wouldn’t be able to say yes. And I wouldn’t be able to say no. “Maybe I’ll ask you in Big Sur. We’re staying on top of these cli s, surrounded by oak trees, prettiest trees you’ve ever seen in your life. And you get to sleep beneath them, you sleep in yurts, which look up at all those trees, which look out on the ocean. One of them has our name on it.” “I’ve never slept in a yurt,” I said. “Well, you won’t be able to say that next week.” He took his drink back, took a long sip. “And I know I’m getting ahead of myself, but you should probably know, I can’t wait to be your husband,” he said. “Just for the record.” “Well, I’m not going on the record,” I said. “But I feel the same.” This is when Bailey came back to the table. She sat down and dug into her pasta, a delicious southern Italian rendition of Cacio e Pepe. It was a decadent
mix of cheese and spicy pepper and salty olive oil. Owen leaned in and took a huge bite, right o her plate. “Dad!” She laughed. “Sharing is caring,” he said, his mouth full. “Wanna hear something cool?” “Sure,” she said. And she smiled at him. “Hannah got us all tickets to see the revival of Barefoot in the Park tomorrow night at the Ge en,” he said. “Neil Simon is one of her favorites too. Doesn’t that sound great?” “We’re seeing Hannah again tomorrow?” she said. The words were out of her mouth before she could stop herself. “Bailey…” Owen shook his head. Then he gave me an apologetic look: I’m sorry she’s being like this. I shrugged: It’s really okay, however she wants to be. I meant it. It was okay with me. She was a teenager who hadn’t had a mother for most of her life. All she had was her father. I didn’t expect her to be good with the prospect of sharing him with someone else. I didn’t think anyone else should expect that of her either. She looked down, embarrassed. “Sorry I just… have a lot of homework to do,” she said. “No, please, it’s ne,” I said. “I have a ton of work to do too. Why don’t you two go to the play? Just you and your dad. And maybe we’ll meet up back at the hotel, if you end up getting your work done?” She looked at me, waiting for the catch. There was none. I wanted her to understand that. Regardless of what I was going to do right in terms of her, and what I was going to do wrong (and based on how things were starting, I knew I was going to do a lot that she considered wrong), there was never going to be a catch. That was a promise I could make her. As far as I was concerned, she didn’t have to be nice. She didn’t have to pretend. She only had to be herself. “Honestly, Bailey. No pressure either way…” I said. Owen reached over and took my hand. “I’d really like us to all go together,” he said. “Next time,” I said. “We’ll do it next time.”
Bailey looked up. And I saw it there before she could hide it. I saw it in her eyes, like a secret she didn’t mean to let me in on—her gratitude that I had understood her. I saw how much she needed someone to understand her, someone besides her father. How she thought it for just a second—that just maybe that someone might turn out to be me. “Yeah,” she said. “Next time.” And, for the rst time, she smiled at me.
You Have to Do Some Things on Your Own We walk down the long hallway lined with those art photographs, passing by one of the California Coast. The gorgeous coast near Big Sur. The photograph is at least seven feet long, a bird’s-eye view of that almost impossible stretch of road carved into the divide of steep mountain, rock, and ocean. I’m so focused on it, taking some comfort in the familiar landscape, that I almost miss it when we pass the dining room. I almost miss the dining room table inside. My dining room table—the one that was featured in Architectural Digest. The table that helped launch my career. It’s my most reproduced piece. A big box store even started replicating the table after the AD feature came out. It stops me. Nicholas said his wife carefully picked every piece of furniture in this house. What if she came across the feature in Architectural Digest? What if that was what led her to the table? It was possible. The feature was still on their website. Enough clicks in recent years could have led her to her lost granddaughter, if she had been searching closely enough, if she had only known what to be searching for. Enough moves, after all, led me here, to this house I don’t want to be in—a piece of my past nding me here, as if I need another reminder that everything that matters in my life is at the mercy of what happens now. Nicholas pulls open a thick, oak door and holds it for me. I avoid looking back at Ned, who is a couple of feet behind us. I avoid looking at the drooling dogs, who stroll by his side. I follow Nicholas into his home o ce and take it in—the dark leather chairs and reading lamps, the mahogany bookshelves. Encyclopedias and classic books
line the shelves. Nicholas Bell’s diplomas and accolades hang on the walls. Summa cum laude. Phi Beta Kappa. Law Review. They are framed, proudly. His o ce feels di erent from the rest of the house. It feels more personal. The room is lled with photographs of his family—on the walls, on the credenza, on the bookshelves. The desk is devoted entirely to photographs of Bailey, though. Photographs that are framed in sterling silver, photographs that are blown up into twice their normal sizes. They are all of small Bailey with her dark eyes, wide like saucers. And her tender curls—none of them yet purple. Then there is her mother, Kate. She holds Bailey in nearly every photograph displayed: Bailey and Kate eating ice cream; Bailey and Kate cuddling on a park bench. I focus on one of Bailey at a few days old, in a little blue beanie. Kate lies in bed with her, her lips to Bailey’s lips, her forehead against her forehead. It just about breaks my heart. And I assume that is why Nicholas keeps it in his view— why he keeps all of them in view—so every day they will just about break his. This is the thing about good and evil. They aren’t so far apart—and they often start from the same valiant place of wanting something to be di erent. Ned remains in the hallway. Nicholas nods in his direction, and he closes the door. The thick, oak door. The bodyguard is in the hallway, the dogs in the hallway. And the two of us are inside the o ce, alone. Nicholas walks over to the bar and pours us each a drink. Then he hands mine over and takes a seat behind his desk, leaving me the chair in front of it—a deep, leather chair with gold etchings. “Make yourself comfortable,” he says. I sit down with my drink in my hand. But I’m not happy about having my back to the door. I have the thought, for a second, that it isn’t impossible someone could walk in and shoot me. One of the bodyguards could surprise me, the dogs could spring to action. Charlie himself could storm in. Maybe I have misunderstood what Owen put in his will. Maybe in this attempt to get Bailey and Owen out of what I have gotten them deeper into, I have left myself alone in the lion’s den. A sacri ce. In the name of Kate. Or Owen. Or Bailey. I remind myself that’s okay. If I do what I came here to do, I’ll accept that.
I put my drink down. And my eyes travel back to the photographs of baby Bailey. I notice one of her in a party dress, a bow wrapped around her head. It provides me some comfort, which Nicholas seems to notice. He picks it up and hands it to me. “That was Kristin’s second birthday. She was already talking in full sentences. It was amazing. I took her to the park, maybe the week after that, and we ran into her pediatrician. He asked her how she was doing and she gave him a two- paragraph answer,” he says. “He couldn’t believe it.” I hold the photograph in my hands. Bailey stares back at me, those curls a prelude to her whole personality. “I believe it,” I say. Nicholas clears his throat. “I take it she’s still like that?” “No,” I say. “Monosyllables are more her speed these days, at least when it comes to me. But, in general, yes. In general, she is a star.” I look up and see Nicholas’s face. He looks angry. I’m not sure why. Is he mad that I have done something to make Bailey not like me the way I wish she would? Or is he mad he has never been given the chance himself? I hand him back his photograph. He places it back on his desk, moving it obsessively to the place where it was before, keeping each piece of her that he has exactly where he can nd it. It feels like a bit of magical thinking, like if he holds on to her just so, that will help him nd her again. “So, Hannah, what can I do for you, exactly?” “Well, I am hoping we can come to an agreement, Mr. Bell.” “Nicholas, please,” he says. “Nicholas,” I say. “And no.” I take a breath, moving forward in my seat. “You didn’t even hear what I have to say yet.” “What I mean is no, that’s not why you’re here, to come to an agreement,” he says. “We both know that. You’re here in the hopes that I’m not who everyone is telling you I am.” “That’s not true,” I say. “I’m not interested in who was right or who was wrong here.”
“That’s good,” he says, “because I don’t think you’d like the real answer. People don’t tend to work that way. We have our opinion and we lter information into a paradigm that supports it.” “Not a big believer that people can change their minds?” I say. “Does that surprise you?” “Not usually, but you’re a lawyer,” I say. “Isn’t convincing people a large part of the job?” He smiles. “I think that you’re confusing me with a prosecutor,” he says. “A defense attorney, at least a good defense attorney, never tries to convince anyone of anything. We do the opposite. We remind everyone you can’t know anything for sure.” Nicholas reaches for the brown box on his desk, a smoke box. He opens the lid and takes out a cigarette. “I won’t ask if you want one. Disgusting habit, I know. But I started smoking when I was a teenager, there wasn’t much else to do in the town I came from. And I started smoking again in prison, same issue,” he says. “Haven’t been able to kick it since. When my wife was still with us, I’d try. Got those nicotine patches. Have you seen those? They help if you have the discipline, but I don’t pretend to anymore. Not since I lost my wife… What’s the point? Charlie gives me grief about it, but there isn’t much he can do. I gure I’m an old man. Something else will get me rst.” He puts the cigarette to his mouth, silver lighter in hand. “I’d like to tell you a little story, if you’ll indulge me,” he says. “Have you heard of Harris Gray?” “I don’t think so,” I say. He lights up, takes a long inhale. “No, of course not. Why would you have? He introduced me to my former employers,” he says. “He was twenty-one when I rst met him and very low on the totem pole. If he had been any more senior, the gentlemen at the head of the organization would have called in one of their in-house lawyers to help him out and I wouldn’t be sitting across from you now. But he wasn’t. And so I was called in to defend him by the city of Austin. Random assignment sent to the public defender’s o ce on a night I was working late. Harris was caught with
some OxyContin. Not a ton, but enough. He was charged with intent to distribute. Which, needless to say, was his intent.” He takes another drag. “My point is, I did my job, maybe a little too well. Usually Harris gets locked up for a period of time, thirty-six months, maybe seventy-two in front of the wrong judge. But I got him o .” “How did you do that?” I ask. “The way you do anything well,” he says. “I paid attention. And the prosecutor didn’t expect that. He was sloppy. He didn’t disclose some of the exculpatory evidence, so I got the case dismissed. And Harris went free. After that, his employers asked to meet me. They were impressed. They wanted to tell me so. And they wanted me to do it again for other members of their organization who found themselves in trouble.” I don’t know what he expects me to say, but he looks at me, perhaps just to make sure I’m listening. “These gentlemen at the head of Harris’s organization decided I showed the kind of prowess that was integral to keeping their workforce… working. So they ew me and my wife to South Florida on a private plane. I had never own rst class before, let alone on a private plane. But they ew me there on their plane and put us up in a waterfront hotel suite with our own butler and made me a business proposition, one that felt di cult to say no to.” He pauses. “I’m not quite sure why I mention the plane or the oceanfront butler. Maybe to suggest to you I was more than slightly out of my depth with my employers. Not that I’m saying that I didn’t have a choice in working for them. I believe you always have a choice. And the choice I made was to defend people who, by law, deserve a proper defense. There’s honor in that. I never lied to my family about it. I spared them some of the details, but they knew the general picture and they knew I didn’t cross any lines. I did my job. I took care of my family. At the end of the day, it’s not all that di erent from working for a tobacco company,” he says. “The same moral calculation needs to be made.” “Except I wouldn’t work for a tobacco company either,” I say. “Well, we don’t all have the luxury of your strict moral code,” he says. There’s an edge to how he says this. I’m taking a chance, arguing with him, except it occurs to me that this may be precisely why he is walking me through
his history, the version of it he wants me to see. To test me. To test whether I’m going to do exactly that—argue, engage. This has to be why he presented his story this way—this is the rst test. He wants to see whether I’ll blindly let him spin in order to ingratiate myself to him or whether I’ll be human. “It’s not that my moral code is so strict, but it seems to me that your employers are causing all sorts of harm and you knew that,” I say. “And you still chose to help them.” “Oh, is that the distinction?” he says. “Do no harm? What about the harm you do when you rip a child from her family right after she loses her mother? What about the harm you do when you deprive that child of knowing everyone who could have reminded her of her mother? Everyone who loved her?” That stops me. And I understand it now. Nicholas didn’t run me through his story to present himself in a better light or to see if I’d engage with him. He told me so I’d lead him here, exactly to this place, where he could put his fury out there. He wanted to wound me with it. He wanted to wound me with the harm Owen caused—with the price of what he chose to do. “I think it’s his hypocrisy that I nd the most staggering,” he says. “Considering that Ethan knew exactly what I was doing and what I wasn’t doing for my employers. He knew more than my own children. In part because he knew about encryption and computers. In part because he and I became close and I let him in. Let’s just say he helped me do certain things. That’s how he was able to cause the trouble that he did.” I don’t know how to argue with that. I don’t know how to argue with Nicholas about any of this. This is how he sees himself, as a family man, as a wronged man. And he sees Owen as the man who wronged him, which makes Owen just as guilty as he is. I can’t argue with something so intrinsic to his understanding of himself. So I decide not to. I decide to go another way. “I don’t think you’re wrong about that,” I say. “No?” he says. “The one thing I know about my husband is that he would do anything for his family. And that’s who you were to him, so I imagine he was quite involved with whatever you asked him to be involved with.” I pause. “Until he decided he couldn’t be anymore.”
“I’d already been working for my employer for a long time when Ethan came into my daughter’s life,” he says. “For other clients too, mind you. I continued to ght for people you’d approve of, I still work for those clients, though I’m sure you’re less interested in my good deeds.” I don’t say anything. He isn’t looking for me to say anything. He is looking to make his point, which is when he starts to get there. “Ethan blamed me for what happened to Kate. He blamed the men I worked for when they had nothing to do with it. She was working for a Texas Supreme Court judge, a very in uential Texas Supreme Court judge? Did you know that?” I nod. “I did.” “Did you know this judge had shifted the Texas court sharply to the left and was imminently set to cast the deciding vote against a large energy corporation, the second largest in the country? If you want to talk about real criminals, these gentlemen were dispelling highly toxic chemicals into the atmosphere at a clip that could make your eyes swell shut.” He watches me. “My point is that this judge, Kate’s boss, was writing a majority opinion against the corporation. It would lead to sweeping reform and cost the energy corporation close to six billion dollars in improved conservation e orts. And the day after my daughter was killed, the judge came home to a bullet in his mailbox. What does that sound like to you? A coincidence? Or a warning shot?” “I don’t know enough,” I say. “Well, Ethan decided he knew enough. He couldn’t be reasoned with that the men I had spent two decades protecting wouldn’t do that to my daughter. That I knew these men and they had their own code of honor. That wasn’t how they did things. Even their most nefarious colleagues didn’t do things like that unprompted. But Ethan didn’t want to believe it. He just wanted to blame me. And he wanted to punish me. As if I wasn’t punished enough.” He pauses. “There is nothing worse than losing your child. Nothing. Especially when you are someone who lives his life for his family.” “I understand that,” I say.
“Your husband didn’t. That was the part he could never understand about me,” he says. “After his testimony, I spent six and a half years in prison as opposed to putting my family at risk by sharing my employer’s secrets. Which they also view as service. So my employers continue to be generous with me now. Even though I’m retired, they consider me family.” “Even though your son-in-law caused many of them to go to prison?” I say. “The people in the organization that were sent to jail along with me were mostly lower level,” Nicholas says. “I took the hit for the upper management. They haven’t forgotten that. They won’t.” “So you could ask them to spare Ethan? Theoretically? If you wanted to?” “Haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been telling you?” he says. “I have no desire to do that. Besides, I can’t pay o his debt. No one can.” “You just said they’d do anything for you.” “Maybe that’s what you wanted to hear,” he says. “What I said was they are generous with me about certain things. Not everything. Even families don’t let everything go.” “No,” I say. “I guess they don’t.” This is when I realize something else that is going on. I gure it out in what Nicholas isn’t owning—not yet, at least. “You never liked Ethan, did you?” I say. “Excuse me?” he says. “Even before all of this, when you rst met him, he wasn’t your choice. For your daughter. This poor kid from South Texas, wanting to marry your only daughter. That couldn’t have been what you wanted for her. He could have been you. He grew up in a town like the one you came from. He was a little too much like what you had organized your life to be better than.” “Are you a therapist?” “Not at all,” I say. “I just pay attention.” He looks at me amused. Apparently he likes this. He likes me throwing his words back at him. “So what are you asking me?” he says. “Everything you did, you did so your children would have di erent choices than you did. Kate. Charlie. Easier choices. So they’d have a promising
childhood. The best schools, the greatest possibilities. So they wouldn’t have to struggle so hard. And yet, one of your children drops out of architecture school and decides to take over your wife’s family bar. Gets divorced.” “Careful,” he says. “And the other one chooses someone who was the last person you’d want for her.” “As my wife used to say, we don’t get to pick who our children love. I made my peace that she chose Ethan. I just wanted her to be happy.” “But you had a feeling, didn’t you? He wasn’t the best person for Kate, he wasn’t going to make her happy.” Nicholas leans forward, his smile gone. “Did you know when Kate and Ethan started dating she didn’t speak to me for a year?” “I didn’t even know Kate existed yesterday,” I say. “So the details as to how that relationship played out aren’t something I’m familiar with.” “She was a freshman in college and she decided she didn’t want to have anything to do with us. With me, rather… her mother she never stopped talking to,” he says. “That was Ethan’s in uence on her. We came through it though. Kate came home again and we made peace. That’s what daughters do. They love their fathers. And Ethan and I…” “You came to trust him?” I say. “I did. I clearly shouldn’t have,” he says. “But I did. I could tell you one story about your husband and you’d never see him the same way again.” I stay quiet. Because I know Nicholas is telling the truth, at least the way he sees it. Owen, in his eyes, is bad. He has done bad things to Nicholas. He betrayed his trust. He stole his granddaughter. He disappeared. Nicholas isn’t wrong about any of that. He may not even be wrong about me. If I choose to wade into the chasm of doubt Nicholas wants to create about Owen, it won’t be hard to go there. Owen isn’t who I thought he was, at least not in the details. There are parts I wish didn’t exist, parts I can’t look away from now. In one way or another, this is the deal we all sign when we love someone. For better or worse. It’s the deal we have to sign again and again to keep that love. We don’t turn away from the parts of someone we don’t want to see.
However quickly or long it takes to see them. We accept them if we are strong enough. Or we accept them enough to not let the bad parts become the entire story. Because there is this too. The details are not the whole story. The whole story still includes this: I love Owen. I love him, and Nicholas isn’t going to sway me that I shouldn’t. He isn’t going to sway me that I’ve been fooled. Despite everything, despite any evidence to the contrary, I believe I haven’t. I believe I know my husband, the pieces and parts that matter most. It’s why I’m sitting here. It’s why I say what I say next. “Regardless of that,” I say, “I think you know how much my husband loves your granddaughter.” “What’s your point?” he says. “I want to make you a deal.” He starts to laugh. “We’re back to this? Darling, you don’t know what you’re saying. It’s not your deal to make.” “I think it is.” “How do you gure?” I take a deep breath, knowing this is the moment of truth with Nicholas. It all comes down to how I sell him this. He’ll hear me now or he won’t. And the only thing that hangs in the balance is my family’s future. My identity. Bailey’s identity. Owen’s life. “I think that my husband would rather be killed than let you near your granddaughter. That’s what I think. He proved that by uprooting everything and moving her away from here. As angry as you are about that, you respect him for being that kind of father. You didn’t think he had that in him.” Nicholas doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t look away either. He holds my eyes with his. I sense he’s getting angry, a little too angry, but I keep going. “And I assume you would like to have a relationship with your granddaughter? I think you want a relationship with her more than almost anything. That you’d be willing to make arrangements with your former colleagues to allow that to happen. From what you’re saying, you can insist they leave us alone, let us keep living our lives,” I say. “If you want to know your granddaughter, I think you know it’s your only play. Either that or letting her
disappear again. Because that is the other option, that is what I’m being told is the option I should be considering. WITSEC, starting over. Your granddaughter no longer allowed to be your granddaughter. Again.” And, like that. It happens. Like a ip has been switched, Nicholas’s eyes going dark, going empty. His face pulsing red. “What did you just say?” he says. He stands up. I push back my chair, almost before I know I’m doing it. I push back closer to the door, as if it’s possible he’s going to lunge for me. It feels possible. Anything feels possible suddenly unless I get out of this room. Until I get away from him. “I don’t like to be threatened,” Nicholas says. “I’m not threatening you,” I say, trying to hold my voice steady. “That wasn’t my intention.” “So what is your intention?” “I’m asking you to help me keep your granddaughter safe,” I say. “I’m asking you to put me in a position where she can know her family. Where she can know you.” He doesn’t sit back down. He stares at me. For a long time. For what feels like a long time. “These other gentlemen,” he says, “my former employers… I could potentially work something out with them. It would cost me quite a bit of capital. And they certainly would wonder who I am becoming in my old age. But… I think we could make sure they leave you and my granddaughter alone.” I nod, my throat catching as I start to ask the question, the next question I need to ask. “And Ethan?” I say. “No, not Ethan,” he says. He says it without equivocation. He says it with nality. “If Ethan were to return, I couldn’t assure you of his safety,” he says. “His debt is too large. As I said, I can’t protect Ethan, even if I were inclined to. Which, to be clear with you, I’m not.” I was prepared for this, for this intractable position. I was as prepared as I could get—a tiny part of me believing I wasn’t going to have to acquiesce to it.
To do what I came here to do. A tiny part of me in disbelief even as I start to do it. “But your granddaughter,” I say. “You could keep her safe? That’s what you’re saying?” “Potentially, yes.” I stay quiet for a moment. I stay quiet until I trust myself to speak. “Okay then,” I say. “Okay then?” he says. “Okay then, what?” “I’d like you to speak with your former employers about doing that,” I say. He doesn’t even try to hide just how confused he is. He is confused because he thought he knew what I was doing here. He thought I was going to beg for Owen’s life, for his safety. He doesn’t understand that this is exactly what I’m doing, even if it doesn’t look like it. “Do you understand what you’re considering here?” he says. I’m considering an Owen-less life. That’s what. A life that isn’t anything like what I’d imagined for myself, but a life where Bailey gets to stay Bailey. She gets to stay the young woman she’s become under Owen’s watchful eye, the one he is so proud of. She’ll continue to live her life, heading to college in two years, heading to whatever life she wants, not as someone else—not as someone she has to pretend to be—but as herself. Bailey and I will go on—but without Owen, without Ethan. Owen, Ethan: the two of them start melding themselves together in my mind—the husband I thought I knew, the husband I didn’t. The husband I don’t get to have. This is what I’m considering. This is the deal I’m willing to make if Nicholas is. Which is when I tell him why. “It’s what Ethan wants,” I say. “To live his life without her?” he says. “I don’t believe that.” I shrug. “It doesn’t make it any less true,” I say. Nicholas closes his eyes. He looks tired suddenly. And I know it’s partially because he is thinking of himself—of the daughter (and granddaughter) he’s had to live his life without. But also because he is feeling sympathy for Owen, sympathy he doesn’t want to feel, but he is feeling it all the same.
And there it is, what Nicholas least expects to show me. His humanity. So I decide to tell him the truth, to say out loud the one thing I’ve been thinking all week, but haven’t said out loud—not to anyone. “I never really had a mother,” I say. “She left when I was little, not much older than when you last saw your granddaughter. And she hasn’t been involved in my life in any meaningful way. An occasional card or a phone call.” “And why are you telling me this?” he says. “For my compassion?” “No, I’m not doing it for that,” I say. “I had my grandfather, who was completely amazing. Inspiring. And loving. I had more than most people.” “So why?” “I’m hoping it helps you understand that even in the face of what else I may lose here, my priority is your granddaughter. Doing what’s right for her, whatever the cost, is worth it,” I say. “You know that better than I do.” “What makes you say that?” he says. “You were there rst.” He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to. Because he understands what I’m telling him. My mother never tried to ght for her family—she never tried to ght for me. That de nes her. Apparently, I’m willing to give up everything to do the opposite for Bailey. One way or another, that will de ne me. And if Nicholas agrees to what I’m asking him, it will de ne him too. We will have that in common. We’ll have Bailey in common. We’ll be the two people doing whatever is needed for her. Nicholas crosses his arms over his chest, almost like in a hug, almost as if bracing himself against what he doesn’t know if he should do. “If a part of you thinks that it will change one day,” he says. “That one day this will go away and Ethan can come back to you, slip back into your lives and they’ll let it slide… it won’t. That’s untenable. These men, they don’t forget. That can never happen.” I summon up the strength to say what I honestly believe. “I don’t.” Nicholas is watching me, taking me in. And I think I have him. Or, at least, we are moving closer toward each other. For better or worse. But there is a knock on the door. And Charlie walks in. Charlie who apparently stayed, despite Nicholas’s instructions. Nicholas doesn’t look happy
with him for that. But he’s about to get less happy. “Grady Bradford is at the front gate,” he says. “And there are a dozen other U.S. marshals standing behind him.” “It took him long enough,” Nicholas says. “What do you want me to do?” Charlie says. “Let him in,” he says. Then Nicholas turns and meets my eyes, the moment between us apparently over. “If Ethan comes home, they’ll know,” he says. “They’ll always be watching for him.” “I understand that.” “They may nd him even if he doesn’t come home,” he says. “Well,” I say. “They haven’t found him yet.” He tilts his head, takes me in. “I think you’re wrong,” he says. “I think it’s the last thing Ethan would want, to spend his life away from his daughter…” “I don’t think it’s the last. No.” “What is?” he says. Something happening to Bailey, I want to say. Something happening because of Owen, because of his ties to all of this, that ends with Bailey getting hurt. That ends with her getting killed. “Something else,” I say. Protect her. Charlie touches my shoulder. “Your ride is here,” he said. “You need to go.” I get up to leave. Nicholas had seemed to hear me but then doesn’t seem to want to hear anything at all. And it’s over. There is nothing else to do. So I follow Charlie. I walk toward the door. Then Nicholas calls out after us. “Kristin…” he says. “Do you think she’ll be open to meeting me?” I turn around and meet his eyes. “I think so,” I say. “Yes.” “What will that look like?” “She’s going to be the one to decide how much and how often she sees you. But I will make sure that the well isn’t poisoned. I’ll make sure she understands that a lot of what happened here has nothing to do with how you feel about her. And that she should know you.”
“And she’ll listen to you?” A week before the answer would have been no. Earlier today, wasn’t it no too? She walked out of the hotel room, knowing I wanted her to stay put. And yet, I need him to believe the answer is yes. I need him to believe it and I need to believe it too, in order to pull this o . I know everything comes down to this. I nod. “She will.” Nicholas pauses for a moment. “Go home,” he says. “You’ll be safe. Both of you. You have my word.” I take a deep breath in. I start to cry, right in front of him, covering my eyes quickly. “Thank you,” I say. He walks up to me, hands me a tissue. “Don’t thank me,” he says. “I’m not doing it for you.” I believe him. I take his tissue anyway. Then I get out of there as quickly as I can.
The Devil Is in the Details Grady says one thing in the car that will stay with me forever. He says one thing to me on the way back to the U.S. Marshals’ o ce where Bailey is waiting. The sun comes up over Lady Bird Lake as we drive, Austin stirring in the early morning. When we merge onto the highway, Grady turns from the road to look at me—as if I would miss it otherwise, how unhappy he is with what I’ve decided to do. Then he says it. “They’re going to get their revenge against Owen, one way or another,” he says. “You should know that.” I hold his eyes, because it’s the least I can do. Because I’m not going to let him scare me. “Nicholas just doesn’t let things go,” he says. “You’re being played.” “I don’t think so,” I say. “And what if you’re wrong?” he says. “What’s the plan? To get on a plane, go back to your life and just hope you guys are safe? You’re not safe. It doesn’t work that way.” “How do you know?” “Fifteen years’ experience for one thing.” “Nicholas has no problem with me,” I say. “I walked into this without knowing anything.” “I know that, you know that. But Nicholas doesn’t, not beyond a doubt. And that’s not the kind of wager he makes.” “I think this is an exceptional circ*mstance.” “Why?”
“I think he wants to know his granddaughter,” I say. “More than he wants to punish Owen.” That stops him. And I can see him considering it. And I see him coming to the conclusion I came to—that, just maybe, that’s true. “Even if you’re right about that, if you do this, you’ll never see Owen again.” There it is, the buzzing in my ear, in my heart. Nicholas saying it, now Grady saying it. As though I don’t know it. I do know, the gravity of it running through me, through my blood. I’m giving up Owen. I’m giving up the chance that on the other side of all this, if there is another side, things will get to go back to Owen and me, together. That it will ever go back to the two of us. I can doubt that Owen is coming home. I can doubt it, but this way I know it. Grady pulls over, on the side of the highway, trucks racing past, the wind shaking the car. “It’s not too late. f*ck Nicholas. f*ck whatever deal that Nicholas thinks you just made him,” he says. “It wasn’t your deal to make. You need to think of Bailey.” “Bailey is all I’m thinking about,” I say. “What is best for her. What Owen would want me to do for her.” “You honestly think he’d want you to pick a path where he never gets to see her again? Never gets to have a relationship with her?” “You tell me, then, Grady,” I say. “You’ve known Owen a lot longer than I have. What do you think he wanted me to do when he disappeared?” “I think he wanted you to lie low until I could help resolve this. Hopefully without his face ending up on the news. Hopefully with a way for you all to keep your identities intact. And, if necessary, with me nding a way to move you all so you could stay together.” “That’s where you lose me,” I say. “Every time.” “What are you talking about?” he says. “What are the chances, Grady? If you moved us, what are the chances they nd us anyway?” “Slim.”
“Meaning what? Five percent chance? Ten percent chance?” I say. “How about the leak last time? Was there a slim chance of that happening too? Because it did happen. Owen and Bailey were put in jeopardy under your watch. Owen wouldn’t want to risk that. He wouldn’t roll the dice on something happening to Bailey.” “I won’t let anything happen to Bailey—” “If these men did nd us, they would get to Owen however they could, wouldn’t they? They wouldn’t stand on ceremony or particularly care if Bailey got caught in the crosshairs. That’s correct, is it not?” He doesn’t answer me. He can’t. “Bottom line is that you can’t guarantee that won’t happen. You can’t guarantee me and you couldn’t guarantee Owen,” I say. “Which is why he left her with me. Which is why he disappeared and didn’t come directly to you.” “I think you’re wrong about that.” “And I think my husband knows who he married,” I say. Grady laughs. “I would think if this taught you anything it’s that no one knows who they marry,” he says. “I disagree,” I say. “If Owen wanted me to sit still and let you run this, he would have said so.” “So how do you explain the email correspondence he sent me? The detailed les he kept? They’re going to help ensure that Avett is punished for his crimes. The FBI is already into a plea deal that is going to put Avett away for the next twenty years…” he says. “How do you explain your husband doing that? How do you explain away his setting everything up so he could enter witness protection?” “I think he did that for another reason.” “What’s that?” he says. “His legacy?” “No,” I say. “Bailey’s.” He smirks, and I can hear all the things he wants to tell me but feels like he can’t tell me. I can hear all the things he knows about Owen—the same things Nicholas knows, but with a di erent sheen on them. Maybe he thinks telling me something closer to the truth will move me closer to his side. I’ve already picked a side though. Bailey’s. And mine.
“I’m going to say this as simply as I can,” he says. “Nicholas is a bad f*cking man. He is going to punish you one day. Bailey may be safe, but if he can’t get to Owen, he’ll punish you in order to hurt him. You’re completely expendable to him. He doesn’t care about you.” “I don’t think he does,” I say. “So then you have to know how risky this is for you to just try and go back to your life?” he says. “I can only protect you if you let me.” I don’t answer him, because he wants me to say yes—yes, I’ll let him protect me. Yes, I’ll let him protect us. And I’m not going to say that. I’m not going to say it because I know this much is true: he can’t. Nicholas can probably get to us anyway, if that’s what he wants to do. That’s what this all has taught me. One way or another, things come back. Things just came back. So I may as well take a shot at doing the best thing for Bailey. And, by doing it this way, Bailey gets to stay Bailey. No one gave her that choice before. She is already losing so much. The least I can do is give it to her now. Grady starts the car up again, heads back into tra c. “You can’t trust him. It’s crazy for you to think you can. You cannot make a deal with the devil and expect it to turn out okay.” I turn away from him, look out the window. “Except I just did.”
Finding My Way Back to Her Bailey sits in the conference room. She is crying hard. And before I even reach for her, she jumps up and races toward me. She holds tightly to me, her head in the crook of my neck. I hold her like that, ignoring Grady, ignoring everything but her. She pulls away, and I take in her face, her eyes swollen from crying, her hair sticking to her head. She looks like the little girl version of herself, needing more than anything for someone to tell her that she is safe now. “I shouldn’t have left the room,” she says. I push her hair o her face. “Where did you go?” “I shouldn’t have gone anywhere,” she says. “I’m sorry. But I thought I heard a knock on the door, which completely freaked me out. And then my cell phone rang and I picked it up. And there was all this static. I kept saying hello and getting that static. And so I went into the hall to see if I could hear any better, and I don’t know…” “You kept going?” I say. She nods. Grady shoots me a look, like I’m out of bounds to comfort her. Like I’m simply out of bounds. This is how he sees things now. His plan for Owen and Bailey is on one side of a line and I’m on the other. This is the only way he sees me now—as the main impetus toward his imagined solution. “I thought it was my father on the phone. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the static, or the blocked number. I just felt it strongly that he was trying to reach me and so I thought I’d walk for a minute, see if he tried me again. And when he didn’t, I just… kept going. I didn’t think too much about it.”
I don’t ask her why she didn’t at least let me know before she left that she was okay. Maybe she didn’t trust that I would let her do what she needed to do. That was probably a part of it. But I knew the other part wasn’t about me, so I decide not to make it about me now. It’s never about someone else the moment you realize it is up to you to get yourself to a better place. It’s only about guring out how to get there. “I went back to the library,” she says. “I went back to campus. I had Professor Cookman’s roster with me and I just started going through the yearbook archive again. We ran out of there so fast after seeing the photograph of… Kate. And I just thought… I thought I needed to know. Before I left Austin.” “And did you nd him?” She nods. “Ethan Young,” she says. “The last guy on that list…” I don’t say anything, waiting for her to nish. “And then he did call,” she says. That stops me. “What are you talking about?” I say. I almost faint. She spoke to Owen. She got to speak to Owen. “You spoke to your father?” Grady says. She looks up at him, o ers a small nod. “Can I talk to Hannah alone?” she asks. He kneels down in front of her, not leaving the room. Which apparently is his way of saying no. “Bailey,” he says, “you’ve got to tell me what Owen said. It will help me help him.” She shakes her head, like she can’t believe she has to have this conversation in front of him. Like she has to have it, at all. I motion for her to tell me, to tell us. “It’s okay,” I say. She nods, keeps her eyes on me. Then she starts talking. “I had just found this photograph of Dad, he looked heavy and his hair was so long, like shoulder length… like basically a mullet. And I just… I almost laughed, he looked so ridiculous. So di erent. But it was him,” she says. “It was de nitely him. And I turned my phone on to call you, to tell you. And then I was getting an incoming call on Signal.”
Signal. Why does that sound familiar? It comes back to me: the three of us eating dumplings at the Ferry Building a few months back, Owen taking Bailey’s phone and telling her he was putting an app on it. An encryption app called Signal. He told her nothing on the internet ever goes away. He made some terrible joke about if she ever sends sexy messages (he actually said sexy), she should use the app. And she pretended to throw up her dumplings. And then Owen got serious. He said if there were a phone call or a text she wanted to disappear, this was the app she should use. He said it twice so she took it in. I’ll keep it on there forever, if you never use the word sexy around me again, she said. Deal, he said. Now, Bailey is talking fast. “When I said hello, he was already talking. He didn’t say where he was calling from. He didn’t ask if I was okay. He said he had twenty-two seconds. I remember that. Twenty-two. And then he said that he was sorry, sorrier than he could tell me, that he’d organized his life so he would never have to make this phone call.” I eye her as she ghts back tears again. She doesn’t look at Grady. She only looks at me. “What did he say?” I ask gently. I see it weigh on her. I see it weigh deeper than anything should weigh on such young shoulders. “He said it’s going to be a long time before he can call again. He said…” She shakes her head. “What, Bailey?” I say. “He said… he can’t really come home.” I watch her face as she tries to process that—this terrible, impossible thing. The terrible, impossible thing he never wanted to say to her. The terrible, impossible thing I’ve been suspecting myself. The terrible, impossible thing I’ve known. He is gone. He isn’t coming back. “Does he mean… ever?” she asks. Before I even answer her, Bailey moans, quick and guttural, her voice catching against that knowledge. Against what she knows too. I put my hand on her hand, her wrist, and hold her tight.
“I really don’t think that…” Grady jumps in. “I just… really don’t think you know that’s what he meant.” I drill him with a look. “And as upsetting as the phone call was,” he says, “what we need to be talking about right now is next steps.” She keeps her eyes on me. “Next steps?” she says. “What does that mean?” I hold her gaze so it’s just the two of us. I move in close so she’ll believe me when I tell her she is the one who gets to decide. “Grady means where the two of us go now,” I say. “Whether we go home…” “Or whether we help you create a new home,” Grady says. “Like I was talking to you about. I can nd you and Hannah a good place to stay where you’ll get to start over fresh. And your father will join you when he thinks it’s safe to come back. Maybe he thinks that can’t happen tomorrow, maybe that’s what he was trying to say in the phone call, but—” “Why not?” she interrupts him. “Excuse me?” She meets his eyes. “Why not tomorrow?” she says. “Forget tomorrow. Why not today? If my father truly knows you’re the best option, then why isn’t he here with us now? Why’s he still running?” Before he can stop himself, Grady lets out a small laugh, an angry laugh, as though I coached Bailey to ask that question—as though it isn’t the only question someone who knows and loves Owen would be asking. Owen avoided being ngerprinted. He avoided having his face plastered all over the news. He did what he needed to do to avoid outside forces blowing up Bailey’s life. Her true identity. So where is he? There’s nothing else to play out. There’s no other move to make. If he were going to be coming back, if he thought it was safe to start over together, he’d be here now. He’d be here beside us. “Bailey, I don’t think I’m going to give you an answer right now that will satisfy you,” he says. “What I can do is tell you that you should let me help you anyway. That’s the best way to keep you safe. That’s the only way to keep you safe. You and Hannah.” She looks down at her hand, my hand on top of it.
“So… that is what he meant then? My father?” she says. “He’s not coming back?” She is asking me. She is asking me to con rm what she already knows. I don’t hesitate. “No, I don’t think he can,” I say. I see it in her eyes—her sadness moving into anger. It will move back again and from there into grief. A erce, lonely, necessary circle as she starts to grapple with this. How do you begin to grapple with this? You just do. You surrender. You surrender to how you feel. To the unfairness. But not to despair. I won’t let her despair, if it’s the only thing I manage to do. “Bailey…” Grady shakes his head. “We just don’t know that’s true. I know your father—” She snaps her head up. “What did you say?” “I said, I know your father—” “No. I know my father,” she says. Her skin is reddening, her eyes erce and rm. And I see it—her decision forming, her need cementing, into something no one can take from her. Grady keeps talking but she is done trying to hear him. She is looking at me when she says the thing I thought she would say—the thing I thought she would come to all along. The reason I went to Nicholas, the reason I did what I did. She says it to me alone. She has given up on the rest of it. With time, I’m going to have to build that back. I’m going to have to do whatever I can to help her build that back. “I just want to go home,” she says. I look at Grady, as if to say, you heard her. Then I wait for the thing he has no choice but to do. To let us go.
Two Years and Four Months Ago “Show me how to do it,” he said. We turned on the lights in my workshop. We had just left the theater, after our non-date, and Owen asked if he could come back to the workshop with me. No funny business, he said. He just wanted to learn how to use a lathe. He just wanted to learn how I do what I do. He looked around and rubbed his hands together. “So… where do we start?” he said. “Gotta pick a piece of wood,” I said. “It all starts with picking a good piece of wood. If that’s no good, you have nowhere good to go.” “How do you woodturners pick?” he said. “We woodturners go about it in di erent ways,” I said. “My grandfather worked with maple primarily. He loved the coloring, loved how the grains would turn themselves out. But I use a variety of woods. Oak, pine, maple.” “What’s your favorite kind of wood to work with?” he asked. “I don’t play favorites,” I said. “Oh, good to know.” I shook my head, biting back a smile. “If you’re going to make fun of me…” I said. He put his hands up in surrender. “I’m not making fun of you,” he said. “I’m fascinated.” “Okay, well then, without sounding corny, I think di erent pieces of wood appeal to you for di erent reasons,” I said. He moved over to my work area, bent down so he was eye to eye with my largest lathe. “Is that my rst lesson?”
“No, the rst lesson is that to pick an interesting piece of wood to work with, you need to understand that good wood is de ned by one thing,” I said. “My grandfather used to say that. And I think that is de nitely true.” He rubbed his hand along the piece of the pine I was working with. It was a distressed pine—dark in color, rich for a pine. “What de nes this guy?” he said. I placed my hand over a spot in the middle, blanched to almost a blond, totally washed out. “I think this part, right here, I think it could turn out interesting,” I said. He put his hand there too, not touching my hand, not trying—only trying to understand what I was showing him. “I like that, I like that philosophy, is what I mean…” he says. “I kind of think you could probably say the same thing about people. At the end of the day, one thing de nes them.” “What de nes you?” I said. “What de nes you?” he said. I smiled. “I asked you rst.” He smiled back at me. He smiled, that smile. “Okay, ne,” he said. Then he didn’t hesitate, not for a second. “There is nothing I wouldn’t do for my daughter.”
Sometimes You Can Go Home Again We sit on the tarmac, waiting for the plane to take o . Bailey stares out the window. She looks exhausted—her eyes dark and pu y, her skin a splotchy red. She looks exhausted and she looks scared. I haven’t told her everything yet. But she understands enough. She understands enough that I’m not surprised she is scared. I’d be surprised if she weren’t. “They’ll come visit,” I say. “Nicholas and Charlie. They can bring your cousins if you want. I think that would be a nice thing. I think your cousins really want to meet you.” “They won’t stay with us or anything?” she says. “No. Nothing like that. We’ll have a meal or two together. Start there.” “And you’ll be there?” “For all of it,” I say. She nods, taking this in. “Do I have to decide about my cousins right now?” she says. “You don’t have to decide about anything right now.” She doesn’t say anything else. She understands—as well as she is allowing herself to integrate it—that her father isn’t coming home. But she doesn’t want to talk about it, not yet. She doesn’t want to navigate with me what things will look like without him, what they’ll feel like. That too doesn’t need to happen right now. I take a deep breath in and try not to think about all the things that do have to happen—if not right now, then soon. The steps we’ll have to take, one after another, to move through our lives now. Jules and Max will pick us up at the
airport, our refrigerator stocked with food for today, dinner waiting on the table. But those things will have to keep happening, day in and day out, until they start to feel normal again. And there are things I can’t avoid happening, like the fallout coming several weeks from now (or several months from now), when Bailey is on her way to something like recovery, and I’ll have my rst still moment to think about myself. To think about what I’ve lost, what I’ll never have back. To think only of myself. And of Owen. Of what I’ve lost—what I’m still losing—without him. When the world gets quiet again, it will take everything I am not to allow the grief of his loss to level me. The strangest thing will stop it from leveling me. I’ll have an answer to the question that I’m only now starting to consider: If I had known, would I be here? If Owen told me, out of the gate, that he had this past, if he had warned me about what I would be walking into, would I have chosen him anyway? Would I have chosen to end up where I am now? It will remind me brie y of that moment of grace my grandfather provided shortly after my mother’s departure when I realized I belonged exactly where I was. And I’ll feel the answer move through me, like a blinding heat. Yes. Without hesitation. Even if Owen had told me, even if I had known every last bit. Yes, I would choose this. It will keep me going. “What is taking so long?” Bailey says. “Why aren’t we taking o yet?” “I don’t know. I think the ight attendant said something about a backup on the runway,” I say. She nods and wraps her arms around herself, cold and unhappy, her T-shirt unable to compete against the frosty airplane air. Her arms covered with goose bumps. Again. Except this time I’m prepared. Two years ago—two days ago—I wasn’t. But now, apparently, is a di erent story. I reach into my bag and pull out Bailey’s favorite wool hoodie. I slipped the hoodie into my carry-on bag to have it ready for this moment. I know, for the rst time, how to give her what she needs. It isn’t everything, of course. It isn’t even close. But she takes her sweater, putting it on, warming her elbows with her palms.
“Thanks,” she says. “Sure,” I say. The plane jerks forward a few feet, and then back. Then, slowly, it starts easing down the runway. “There we go,” Bailey says. “Finally.” She sits back in her seat, relieved to be on the way. She closes her eyes and puts her elbow on our shared armrest. Her elbow is there, the plane is picking up speed. I put my elbow there too, and I feel her do it, I feel us both do it. We move a little closer to each other as opposed to doing the opposite. It feels like what it is. A start.
Five Years Later. Or Eight. Or Ten. I’m at the Paci c Design Center in Los Angeles, participating in a First Look exhibition, with twenty-one other artisans and producers. I’m debuting a new collection of white oak pieces (mostly furniture, a few bowls and larger pieces) in the showroom they’ve provided. These exhibitions are great for exposure to potential clients, but they are also like a reunion of sorts—and, like most reunions, somewhat of a grind. Several architects and colleagues stop by to say hello, catch up. I have done my best with the small talk, but I’m starting to feel tired. And, as the clock winds toward 6 P.M., I feel myself looking past people as opposed to at them. Bailey is supposed to meet me for dinner, so I’m mostly on the lookout for her, excited to have the excuse to shut it all down for the day. She’s bringing a guy she recently started dating, a hedge funder named Shep (two points against him), but she swears I’ll like him. He’s not like that, she says. I’m not sure if she is referring to him working in nance or having the name Shep. Either way, he seems like a reaction to her last boyfriend, who had a less irritating name (John) and was unemployed. So it is, dating in your twenties, and I’m grateful that these are the things she’s thinking about. She lives in Los Angeles now. I live here too, not too far from the ocean—and not too far from her. I sold the oating house as soon as Bailey graduated high school. I don’t harbor any illusions that this means I’ve avoided them keeping tabs on us—the shadowy gures waiting to pounce should Owen ever return. I’m sure they are still watching on the o chance he risks it and comes back to see us. I operate as if they are always watching, whether or not he does.
Sometimes I think I see them, in an airport lounge or outside a restaurant, but of course I don’t know who they are. I pro le anyone who looks at me a second too long. It stops me from letting too many people get close to me, which isn’t a bad thing. I have who I need. Minus one. He walks into the showroom, casually, a backpack over his shoulders. His shaggy hair is buzz cut short and darker, and his nose is crooked, like it’s been broken. He wears a button-down shirt, rolled up, revealing a sleeve of tattoos, crawling out to his hand, to his ngers, like a spider. This is when I clock his wedding ring, which he is still wearing. The ring I made for him. Its slim oak nish is perhaps unnoticeable to anyone else. I know it cold though. He couldn’t look less like himself. There is that too. But maybe this is what you do when you need to hide from people in plain sight. I wonder. Then I wonder if it isn’t him, after all. It isn’t the rst time I think I see him. I think I see him everywhere. I’m so ustered that I drop the papers I’m holding, everything falling to the oor. He bends over to help me. He doesn’t smile, which would give him away. He doesn’t so much as touch my hand. It would be too much, probably, for both of us. He hands me the papers. I try and thank him. Do I say it out loud? I don’t know. Maybe. Because he nods. Then he stands up and starts to head out, the way he came. And it’s then that he says the one thing that only he would say to me. “The could-have-been boys still love you,” Owen says. He isn’t looking at me when he says it, his voice low. The way you say hello. The way you say goodbye. My skin starts burning, my cheeks aring red. But I don’t say anything. There’s no time to say anything. He shrugs and shifts his backpack higher on his shoulder. Then he disappears into the crowd. And that’s that. He is just another design junkie, on his way to another booth.
I don’t dare watch him go. I don’t dare look in his direction. I keep my eyes down, pretending to organize the papers, but the heat coming o me is tangible—that erce red lingering on my skin, on my face, if anyone is paying close enough attention in that moment. I pray they are not. I make myself count to a hundred, then to a hundred and fty. When I nally allow myself to look up, it’s Bailey that I see. It cools me out, immediately, centers me. She is walking toward me from the same direction Owen has gone. She’s in her gray sweater dress and high-top Converse, her long, brown hair running halfway down her back. Did Owen pass her? Did he get to see for himself how beautiful she has become? How sure of herself? I hope so. I hope so at the same time I hope not. Which way, after all, spares him? I take a deep breath and take her in. She walks hand in hand with Shep, the new boyfriend. He gives me a salute, which I’m sure he thinks is cute. It isn’t. But I smile as they walk up. How can I not? Bailey is smiling too. She is smiling at me. “Mom,” she says.
Acknowledgments I started working on this book in 2012. There were many times I put it aside, but I couldn’t seem to let it go. I am so grateful to Suzanne Gluck, whose astute guidance on each iteration helped me to nd the story that I was hoping to tell. Marysue Rucci, your thoughtful edits and sage comments have elevated this novel in every way. Thank you for being the best partner a writer could hope for, my dream editor, and a dear friend. My gratitude to the amazing team at Simon & Schuster: Dana Canedy, Jonathan Karp, Hana Park, Navorn Johnson, Richard Rhorer, Elizabeth Breeden, Zachary Knoll, Jackie Seow, Wendy Sheanin, Maggie Southard, and Julia Prosser; and to Andrea Blatt, Laura Bonner, Anna Dixon, and Gabby Fetters at WME. Sylvie Rabineau, we’ve been in this thing together since book one, day one. Thank you for being my most trusted advisor, Jacob’s “Sylv,” and one of my favorite people on the planet. I love you. I am indebted to Katherine Eskovitz and Greg Andres for their legal expertise, to Simone Puglia for being a great Austin guide, and to Niko Canner and Uyen Tieu for the gorgeous woodturned bowl that sits on my desk, and that inspired so much of Hannah. For reading many drafts (over the last eight years!) and providing other invaluable help and insight, thank you: Allison Winn Scotch, Wendy Merry, Tom McCarthy, Emily Usher, Stephen Usher, Johanna Shargel, Jonathan Tropper, Stephanie Abram, Olivia Hamilton, Damien Chazelle, Shauna Seliy, Dusty Thomason, Heather Thomason, Amanda Brown, Erin Fitchie, Lynsey Rubin, Liz Squadron, Lawrence O’Donnell Jr., Kira Goldberg, Erica Tavera, Lexi Eskovitz, Sasha Forman, Kate Capshaw, James Feldman, Jude Hebert, Kristie Macosko Krieger, Marisa Yeres Gill, Dana Forman, and Allegra Caldera.
