Laura Dave - The Last Thing He Told Me

“I’m not saying you don’t know what you’re talking about, Jake, but I can assure you, he exists. His daughter is sleeping fifteen feet from me.”

“Let me rephrase,” he says, “ your Owen Michaels doesn’t exist. Besides a birth certificate and social security number that match, for both Owen and his daughter, the rest of the details are inconsistent.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The investigator I was telling you about, and he knows what he is doing, says that no Owen Michaels exists that fits your husband’s biography. There are several Owen Michaels who grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, and a few who attended Princeton University. But the only Owen Michaels on record who grew up in Owen’s hometown and attended Princeton is seventy-eight years old and lives with his partner, Theo Silverstein, in Provincetown, out on Cape Cod.”

I’m having troubling breathing. I sit down on the hallway carpet, my back against the wall. I can feel it. A knocking in my head, a knocking in my heart. No Owen Michaels is your Owen Michaels. The words moving through me, unable to find a home.

“Should I go on?” he says.

“No thank you.”

“No Owen Michaels purchased or owned a home in Seattle, Washington, in 2006 or enrolled his daughter, Bailey, in preschool that year or had a registered income tax return anytime before 2009…”

That stops me. “That was the year he and Bailey moved to Sausalito.”

“Exactly. That’s where the record for your Owen Michaels starts. And from then on pretty much what you told me matches up. Their home, Bailey’s schooling. Owen’s work. And, of course, it was smart of him to purchase a floating home as opposed to a real house. Less of a paper trail. He doesn’t even own the land. It’s more like a rental. Harder to trace.”

I put my hands over my eyes, trying to stop the spinning in my head, trying to get steadier.

“Before they arrived in Sausalito, I haven’t found one piece of data that supports the story your husband has told you about his life. He went by another name or he went by his current name and just lied to you about every other thing. He lied about who he was.”

I don’t say anything at first. Then I manage to get out the question. “Why?” I say.

“Why would Owen change his name? The details of his life?” he asks.

I nod as though he can see me.

“I asked the investigator the same thing,” Jake says. “He says there are usually two reasons why someone changes his identity, and you’re not going to like either of them.”

“No kidding?”

“The most common reason, believe it or not, is the person has a second family somewhere. Another wife. Another child. Or children. And he’s trying to keep the two lives separate.”

“It’s not possible, Jake,” I say.

“Tell that to a client we have now, this oil magnate billionaire who has a wife in North Dakota at his family’s ranch and another in San Francisco in some mansion in Pacific Heights. Down the street from Danielle Steel. Twenty-nine years he has been with both women. Five children with one, five children with the other. And they have no idea. They think he travels a lot for work. They think he’s a great husband. We only know about his dual families because we put a will together for him… that’s going to be a fun estate reading.”

“What’s the other reason Owen might have done this?” I say.

“Assuming he doesn’t have another wife hanging out somewhere?”

“Yes. Assuming that.”

“The other reason someone creates a false identity, which is the working theory here, is that he’s involved in some sort of criminal activity,” he says. “And he ran to avoid trouble, to start a new life, to protect his family. But, almost across the board, the criminal gets in trouble again, which is his undoing.”

“So that would mean that Owen was in trouble with the law before? That he’s not only guilty of what’s happening at The Shop, but he’s guilty of something else too?”

“It would certainly explain why he ran,” Jake said. “He knew when The Shop imploded, he’d be outed. He was more worried about his past catching up to him than anything else.”

“But, by that logic, isn’t it possible he isn’t a criminal?” I say. “That he changed his name to escape someone? Someone who wanted to hurt him or maybe even hurt Bailey?”

Protect her.

“Sure, that’s possible,” he says. “But why wouldn’t he tell you that to begin with?”

I don’t have a good answer. But I need another alternative—something else to explain why Owen isn’t coming up as Owen.

“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.”