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

start to fly up from beneath the bridge out into the sky. The crowd cheers as the bats move in an almost ribbonlike formation—an enormous, orchestrated beautiful swarm of them.

If Charlie is still behind us, I can’t see him. He is gone. Or we are gone, two revelers observing the bats take flight on a pretty Austin night.

I look up at the sky, flooded with the bats, moving as if in a dance together. Everyone applauds as they disappear into the night.

The guy in the Hawaiian shirt angles his camera to the sky, shooting pictures as they depart.

I slide past him and motion for Bailey to keep up. “We have to move,” I say. “Before we get stuck here.”

Bailey picks up the pace. And we make it over the bridge, both of us breaking into a jog. We don’t stop until we turn down our hotel’s long driveway. We don’t stop until we are in front of the hotel, the doormen holding the door open.

“Just wait,” Bailey says. “We need to stop for a second.”

She puts her hands on her knees, catching her breath. I want to argue. We are so close to being on the safe side of the hotel’s doors, so close to the privacy of our small room.

“What if I told you I remembered him?” she says.

I look over at the doormen, who are chatting with each other. I try to meet their eyes, get them to focus, as if they will keep us safe.

“What if I said I know him, Charlie Smith?”

“Do you?”

“I remember being called by that name,” she says. “Kristin. Hearing him say it, all of a sudden I remembered. How do you forget something like that? How is that even possible?”

“We forget all sorts of things that no one helps us remember,” I say.

Bailey gets quiet. Silent, actually. Then she says it, the words both of us have avoided saying out loud.

“You think that woman Kate is my mother, don’t you?”

She pauses on the word mother, like it has fire in it.

“I do. I could be wrong, but I do.”

“Why would my father lie about who my mother is?”

She meets my eyes. I don’t try to answer her. I have no good answer for her.

“I’m just not sure who I should be trusting here,” she says.

“Me,” I say. “Just me.”

She bites her lip, like she believes me, or at least like she is starting to believe me—which is more than I could hope for in this moment. Because you can’t tell people to trust you. You have to show them that they can. And I haven’t had enough time.

The doormen are looking at us. I’m not sure they are listening, but they are looking. And I feel it. I feel how much I need to get Bailey out of here. Out of Austin. Immediately.

“Come with me,” I say.

She doesn’t fight me. We walk past the doormen and into the hotel lobby, head to the elevator bank.

But, as we step inside, a man gets on too—a young guy who I think is looking at Bailey strangely. He wears a gray sweater vest, piercings covering his ears. I know it is paranoid to think he is following us. I know it. If he is looking at Bailey, it is probably only because she is beautiful.

I’m not taking that chance though, so I move us off the elevator, and toward the back staircase, heart pounding.

I open the door, point toward the staircase. “This way,” I say.

“Where are we going?” she says. “We’re eight floors up.”

“Just be glad it’s not twenty.”

Eighteen Months Ago

“Is there anything else I should know?” I asked. “Before this plane takes off?”

“Are we talking metaphorically or actually? Like the actual mechanics of the plane? Because I did do a brief stint at Boeing when I first got to Seattle.”

We were on the flight from New York to San Francisco, a one-way ticket for me. The Shop had sprung for first class for both of us because Owen had been in New York for business in preparation for The Shop’s IPO. Owen had stayed on for the initial reason he’d been planning to be in New York that week—to help move me out of it.

We had spent the last few days packing up my apartment, packing up my studio. And, when we landed, I’d move into his home. His and Bailey’s. It would become my home too. And, soon, I would be his wife.

“I’m asking you what you left out. About you.”

“While you can still get off the plane? We haven’t started taxiing yet. There’s probably still time…”

He squeezed my hand, trying to make light of it. But I was still jumpy. I was suddenly too jumpy.

“What do you want to know?” he said.

“Tell me about Olivia,” I said.

“I’ve told you a lot about Olivia,” he said.

“Not really. I feel like I know only the basics. College sweetheart, teacher. Georgia born and bred.”

I didn’t add the rest… that he lost her in a car accident. That he hadn’t been involved, seriously, with anyone since.

“Now that I’m going to be in Bailey’s life, in a serious way, I want to know more about her mother.”

He tilted his head, like he was considering where to start.

“When Bailey was a baby? We all took a trip to Los Angeles. It was the weekend that a tiger escaped from the Los Angeles Zoo. A young tiger, who had been at the zoo for only a year or so. He didn’t just escape his cage, but the entire premises. And he ended up in a family’s backyard in Los Feliz. When he got there, he didn’t hurt anyone. He curled up under a tree and took a nap. Olivia was consumed with this story, which is probably how she found out the other part.”

I smiled. “What’s that?”

“The family whose backyard the tiger had curled up in had gone to the zoo only a few weeks before and one of their two young boys had