Laura Dave - The Last Thing He Told Me

I start to sidestep the question, but I don’t need to. Belle isn’t waiting for my answer. She just wants to keep talking.

“I mean this whole thing is just ridiculous,” she says. “Avett is an entrepreneur, not a criminal. And Owen’s a genius, though I don’t need to tell you that. I mean, for crying out loud, why the hell would Avett need to do this thing anyway? Steal from his own company? This is, what, his eighth start-up? This late in his career he is going to start inflating values and lying and stealing? Or whatever the hell they say he is doing? Give me a break. We already have more money than we know what to do with.”

She is fighting hard, arguing forcefully. But it doesn’t change what she is leaving out, what she is refusing to acknowledge. Avett’s previous success, the hubris that comes with it, could explain why he refused to fail now.

“Point is, it’s a setup,” she says.

“By who, Belle?”

“How the hell do I know? The government? A competitor? Maybe some hack who wants to get to the market first. That’s Avett’s theory. The point is that we are going to beat this. Avett has worked too hard for too long to be taken down by an accounting mishap.”

And I hear it then, what people—Patty, Carl, Naomi—must hear when they’re talking to me. I hear the crazy. She sounds crazy. Maybe that’s what happens when the bottom falls out, you lose the ability to modulate—to make your words make sense to the rest of the world.

“So are you saying it was a setup or an accounting error?” I pause. “Or are you just saying it’s everyone’s fault except for Avett’s?”

“Excuse me?” she says.

She’s angry. I don’t care. I don’t have time for her, now that I know this conversation is going to a place where she wants something from me. I don’t have anything left to give her.

I look at Bailey, who is watching me with questions in her eyes: Why am I sounding increasingly angry? What does this mean for her father?

“I need to go,” I say.

“Just wait,” she says. Which is when she starts to get to it. What she actually needs.

“Avett’s lawyers are having trouble reaching Owen,” she says. “And we just want to make sure, we just want to know… he isn’t talking to law enforcement, is he? Because that wouldn’t be smart, for any of us.”

“If Avett didn’t do anything wrong, what does it matter what Owen says?”

“Don’t be naive. It doesn’t work that way,” she says.

I can almost see Belle sitting at her kitchen island, on the stool I made for her, shaking her head incredulously, the gold hoops she never takes off slapping at her high cheeks.

“How does it work?”

“Uh… entrapment, forced confessions. Is Owen that stupid?” She pauses. “Is he talking to the police?”

I want to say, all I know is that he isn’t talking to me . I don’t offer Belle that though. I don’t offer her anything. We are in different positions, she and I. She isn’t worried about Avett’s safety. She isn’t sincerely questioning whether the government’s acting in bad faith or whether Avett’s guilty. Belle knows that her husband is guilty. She is just trying to spin it, to do what she needs to do, to stop him from paying for it.

My concern, on the other hand, is how to stop Bailey from paying for it.

“Avett’s lawyers need to debrief with Owen as soon as possible, so the story stays consistent,” Belle says. “We could use your help on this. We all need to stick together.”

I don’t answer her.

“Hannah? Are you still there?”

“No,” I say. “Not anymore.”

Then I hang up. I hang up and go back to pulling up the old UT-Austin football schedule.

“Who was that?” Bailey says.

“Wrong number,” I say.

“Is that what you call Belle these days?” she says.

I look up at her.

“Why even pretend?” she says.

She’s furious and she’s scared. And, apparently, I’m making that worse as opposed to better.

“I’m just trying to protect you from some of this, Bailey,” I say.

“But you can’t,” she said. “That’s the thing. No one can protect me from this. So how about you agree to be the person who tells me the truth?”

She looks older than she is suddenly. Her eyes are unwavering, her lips pursed. Protect her. The one thing Owen asked me to do. The one impossible thing.

I nod, holding her gaze. She wants me to tell her the truth, as if that is a simple thing to do. Maybe it is simpler than I’m making it.

“That was Belle. And she essentially confirmed for me that Avett is guilty, or that, at the very least, he has things to hide. And she seems surprised that Owen has gone off the grid as opposed to helping Avett hide those things. All of which makes me wonder what your father is hiding. And why.” I pause. “So I’d like to find these churches and see if that offers any clue as to why he felt like he had no choice but to leave us. I’d like to figure out if it’s just about The Shop or if what I’m suspecting is true.”

“Which is?”

“What he’s running from goes back further than that,” I say. “And it’s about him. And you.”

She doesn’t say anything. She stands in front of me with her arms crossed over her chest. Then suddenly, she drops them. She drops them and moves in a little closer to me.

“So… when I asked you to tell me the truth, I meant, like, don’t lie about who is on the phone.”

“I went a step too far?”

“In a good way,” she says.

It may be the nicest thing she has ever said to me.

“Well, I was trying to listen.”

“Thank you for that,” she says.

Then she takes the map from my hands and studies it herself.

“Let’s go,” she says.

Three Months Ago

It was 3 A.M., and Owen was sitting at the hotel bar, drinking a tall glass of bourbon, straight.

He felt my eyes on him and looked up.

“What are you doing down here?” he said.

I smiled at him. “I believe that’s my question for you…” I said.

We were staying in San Francisco, in a boutique hotel across from the Ferry Building. There had been a terrible storm. It was the type of rainstorm that didn’t happen in Sausalito too often and it had forced us to evacuate our home, our floating home, due to flooding risks. It forced us to take refuge on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge—the hotel filled up with other floating home expats. Though apparently Owen wasn’t finding much refuge at all.

He shrugged. “Thought I’d come downstairs to have a drink,” he said. “Do some work…”

“On what?” I said.

I looked around. He didn’t have his laptop with him. No papers lying around. There was nothing on the bar at all, except his bourbon. And one other thing.

“Wanna have a seat?” he said.

I sat down on the barstool next to him, wrapping my arms more tightly around myself. I was chilly in the middle-of-the-night coolness. My tank top and sweatpants weren’t much of a match.

“You’re freezing,” he said.

“I’m okay.”

He pulled off his hoodie, putting it over my head. “You will be,” he said.

I looked at him. And waited. I waited for him to tell me what he was really doing down here, what was worrying him enough that he left our room. That he left me in the bed, his daughter on the pullout couch.

“Work is just a little stressful. That’s all. But nothing’s wrong. Nothing I can’t handle.”

He nodded, like he meant it. But he seemed stressed. He seemed more stressed than I’d seen him before. When we were packing our bags to come here, I found him in Bailey’s room, packing up Bailey’s childhood piggy bank, putting it in his duffel bag. He’d looked embarrassed when I saw him and explained that it was one of the first presents he’d gotten her. He didn’t want to risk anything happening to it. That wasn’t the weird part—Owen was packing up all sorts of sentimental things (Bailey’s first hairbrush, family photo albums) and dropping them in his overnight bag. The weird part was that the other thing on the bar, besides his drink, was Bailey’s piggy bank.