Laura Dave - The Last Thing He Told Me

“Owen never told me you were a detective.”

“Owen never told me about any of this. Period.”

It seems unwise to harp on the fact that I wouldn’t have come here if Grady had told me what was going on, if anyone had told me the truth about Owen and his past. Grady is too angry to care. Still, I can’t stop myself. If we are pointing fingers, they shouldn’t be pointed at me.

“In the last seventy-two hours, I’ve learned that my husband isn’t the person I thought he was. What was I supposed to do?”

“What I told you to do,” he says. “Lay low, get yourself a lawyer. Let me do my job.”

“And what is that exactly?”

“Owen made a decision over a decade ago to get his daughter out of a life he couldn’t protect her from otherwise. To give her a clean start. I helped him do that.”

“But Jake told me… I thought Owen wasn’t in the protection program.”

“Jake would have been correct that Owen wasn’t in witness protection. Not exactly.”

I look at him, confused. “What the hell does that mean?”

“Owen was set to join WITSEC after he agreed to testify, but he never felt safe. Thought there were too many holes, too many people he’d have to trust. And, during the trial, there was a small leak.”

“What do you mean a small leak?”

“Someone in the New York office compromised the identities we had secured for Owen and Bailey,” he says. “Owen didn’t want any part of government involvement after that.”

“Shocking,” I say.

“It wasn’t typical, but I did understand why he wanted to go another route. Why he disappeared with Bailey. No one knew where they were going. No one else in the Marshals Service knew. We made sure there wasn’t a line that would lead to him.”

Grady flew halfway across the country to check on Owen—to check on his family, to help Owen out of this mess.

“Except you, you mean,” I say.

“He trusted me,” he says. “Maybe because I was new here then. Maybe I earned it. You’ll have to ask him why.”

“Can’t really ask him much of anything at the moment,” I say.

Grady walks over to the windows, leans against them. Maybe it’s because I’m looking for it, but I see something in his eyes, something like sympathy.

“Owen and I don’t talk a whole lot,” he says. “For the most part, he’s just been living his life. I think the last time he reached out was when he told me he was marrying you.”

“What did he say?”

“He told me that you were a game changer,” he says. “He said he’d never been in love like that before.”

I close my eyes against it, how deeply I feel that, and how deeply I feel the same.

“Truth is, I tried to talk him out of pursuing anything with you,” Grady says. “I told him his feelings would pass.”

“Well thank you for that.”

“He wouldn’t listen to me about walking away,” he says. “But he did take my advice, apparently, when I told him he couldn’t tell you about his past. That it was too dangerous for you. That if he really wanted to be with you, he needed to leave his past out of it.”

I think of the two of us in bed, Owen struggling with whether to tell me—Owen wanting to tell me the entire truth of his past. Maybe Grady’s warning stopped him. Maybe Grady’s warning stopped Owen and me from being in a position to handle this together.

“Is this your way of telling me I should blame you instead of him?” I say. “Because I’m happy to do that.”

“This is my way of telling you we all have secrets we don’t share,” he says. “Kind of like your lawyer friend Jake? He told me that you guys were engaged once upon a time.”

“That’s not a secret,” I say. “Owen knew all about Jake.”

“And how do you think he’d feel about you involving him in this?” he says.

I was running out of choices, I want to say. But I know it’s a fool’s errand to argue with him. Grady is intent on putting me on the defensive, as if that will make it easier for him to pry something out of me—not exactly a secret, more like my will. My will to do anything but listen to what he thinks we should do now.

“Why did Owen run, Grady?” I ask.

“He had to,” he says.

“What does that mean?”

“How many photographs have you seen of Avett in the news this week? The media would be all over Owen too. His picture would be everywhere and they’d find him again. Nicholas’s employers. Even though he looks different than he did, he doesn’t look that different. He couldn’t risk that kind of exposure. He had to get out of there before that happened,” he says. “Before he blew up Bailey’s life.”

I take that in. It makes me understand in a different way why there was no time to tell me anything—why there was no time to do anything but go.

“He knew he would have been brought in,” he says. “And when he was, he would’ve been fingerprinted, just like Jordan Maverick was this afternoon. And that would reveal who he actually was, game over.”

“So they think Owen’s guilty?” I say. “Naomi, the FBI, whoever else?”

“No. They think he has answers they need, that’s a different thing,” he says. “But if you’re asking me if Owen was a willing participant in the fraud? I would say not likely.”

“What’s more likely?”

“That Avett knew about Owen.”

I meet his eyes.

“Not any of the specifics, Owen never would have told him, but he knew he hired someone who came out of nowhere. No references to speak of, no ties to the tech world. Owen said at the time that Avett just wanted the best coder he could find, but I think Avett was looking for an angle. He wanted someone he could control, if it turned out he needed that control. And it turned out he did.”

“You think Owen knew what was happening at The Shop but he couldn’t stop it?” I say. “That he stayed there hoping he could fix it, get the software operational, before he got caught in the crosshairs.”

“I do,” he says.

“That’s a pretty specific guess,” I say.

“I know your husband pretty specifically,” he says. “And he’s been watching his back for such a long time that he knew if The Shop scandal touched him, he’d have to disappear all over again. Bailey would have to start over. And this time, of course, she’d have to be told the history. Not ideal to say the least…” He pauses. “Let alone what you would’ve had to give up, assuming you chose to go with them.”

“Assuming I chose to go?”

“Well, you couldn’t really hide out as a woodturner. Even a furniture designer. Whatever you call yourself. You would have to give up everything. Your job, your livelihood. I’m sure he didn’t want that for you.”

I flash to it—one of my early dates with Owen. He asked me what I would do if I hadn’t become a woodturner. And I told him that it was probably because of my grandfather—maybe it was because I associated woodturning with the only stability I’d ever had—but it was all I’d ever wanted to do. I had never really imagined doing anything else.

“He didn’t think I’d choose to go with them, did he?” I say, more to myself than to him.

“That doesn’t matter now. I’ve managed to tamp it down, to keep your friends at the FBI at bay…” he says. “But I won’t be able to pull rank much longer unless you guys are officially being protected.”

“Meaning WITSEC?”

“Yes, meaning WITSEC.”

I don’t say anything, trying to take in the weight of that. I can’t begin to fathom being a protected person. What will that look like? My only experience with anything close is what I’ve seen in the movies—Harrison Ford hanging out with the Amish in Witness , Steve Martin sneaking out of town to get the good spaghetti in My Blue Heaven . Both of them depressed and lost. Then I think of what Jake said. How in reality it’s nowhere near as good as that.