The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave (ebook reader ink .txt) 📕

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s in witness protection,” I say. “That would explain Grady Bradford.”

“I thought of that. But do you remember my buddy Alex? He has a friend who is pretty high up in the U.S. Marshals’ office, so he looked into it for me. And Owen ain’t being protected.”

“Would he tell you?”

“Yeah.”

“What kind of protection program is that?”

“Not a great one. Anyway, he doesn’t match the profile of someone in witness protection,” he says. “Not his job, which is high-rent, not Sausalito. Protected witnesses sell tires somewhere in Idaho. And those are the lucky ones. It’s not what you see in the movies. Most witnesses just get dropped off in the middle of nowhere with a little cash in their wallets and some new IDs and are told good luck.”

“So then what?”

“For my money? It’s option two. He’s guilty of something and he’s been running from it for a long time. And maybe he got caught up in The Shop because of that. Or maybe it’s unrelated. Hard to know. But it would have caught up with him if he was arrested, so he ran to save himself. Or, maybe it’s like you said, and he ran because he thought it was the best way to protect Bailey. To not get her caught up in whatever he’s done.”

It’s the first thing that Jake says that penetrates. It’s what I keep coming back to myself. If it were just Owen’s mistakes that were going to catch up with him, he would’ve stayed with us. He would’ve faced the firing squad. But if any of this would take Bailey down with him, he would make another decision.

“Jake, even if you’re right, even if I don’t know the whole story about the man I married… I know he would only leave Bailey behind if he absolutely had to,” I say. “Forgetting me for a second, if he were running, without any intention of coming back, he’d take her with him. She’s everything to him. Owen doesn’t have it in him to leave her. And just disappear.”

“Two days ago, did you think he had it in him to make up his entire life history? Because he did do that.”

I stare at the ugly hotel hallway carpet with its patterns of fuchsia roses, trying to find in them something like solace.

This feels impossible. Every bit of this feels impossible. How do you begin to grapple with the idea that your husband is running from the person he used to be, a person whose real name you don’t even know? You want to argue that someone is getting the story wrong. Someone is getting your story wrong. In your story, the one you know by heart, none of this makes sense. Not where this story began, not where it’s going. And certainly not where it’s threatening to end.

“Jake, how do I go back inside and tell Bailey that nothing about her father is what she thinks? I don’t know how to tell her that.”

He gets uncharacteristically quiet. “Maybe tell her something else,” he says.

“Like what?”

“Like you have a plan to get her away from this,” he says. “At least until it’s all sorted out.”

“But I don’t.”

“But you could. You absolutely could get her away from this. Come to New York. Stay with me. Both of you, at least until this is all sorted out. I have friends on the board at Dalton. Bailey can finish out the school year there.”

I close my eyes. How am I here again? On the phone with Jake? How is Jake the one who is helping me? When we ended our relationship, Jake said I’d always felt absent to him. I didn’t argue with him—I couldn’t. Because I was a little absent. It had felt like something was missing with Jake. The very thing I’d thought I had with Owen. But if Jake is correct about Owen, then Owen and I didn’t have what I thought we did. Maybe we didn’t have anything close to it, at all.

“I appreciate the offer. And right now it doesn’t sound so bad.”

“But…” he says.

“From what you’re telling me, we got here because Owen ran away,” I say. “I can’t run away too, not until I get to the bottom of this.”

“Hannah, you really need to think of Bailey here.”

I open the hotel room door and peek in. Bailey is sound asleep on her bed. She is curled up in the fetal position, her purple hair sticking out like a disco ball on the pillows. I close the door, step back into the hall.

“That’s all I’m thinking of, Jake,” I say.

“Not yet it’s not,” he says. “Or you wouldn’t be trying to find the one person that in my opinion you should be keeping her away from.”

“Jake, he’s her father,” I say.

“Maybe someone should remind him,” he says.

I don’t say anything. I look out over the glass walls and into the atrium below. Work colleagues (complete with their laminated conference name tags) are lounging in the hotel bar, couples are heading out of the restaurant hand in hand, two exhausted parents are carrying their sleeping children and enough LEGOLAND paraphernalia to open a store. From this far away, they all look happy. Though, of course, I don’t really know. But, for just a moment, I wish I could be any of them as opposed to the person I am. Hiding in a hotel hallway, eight floors up. Trying to process that her marriage, her life, is a lie.

I feel anger surging inside of me. Ever since my mother left, I pride myself on the details, seeing the smallest things about a person. And if someone asked me three days ago, I would have said I know everything there is to know about Owen. Everything that matters anyway. But maybe I know nothing. Because here I am, struggling to figure out the most basic details of all.

“Sorry,” Jake says. “That was a little harsh.”

“That was a little