The Last Thing He Told Me

I turn around. “What?”

She looks up at the building, at the sign in front: THE HOME OF THE TEXAS-EXES.

Then she turns back to the stadium. “This looks familiar,” she says.

“Well, it looks a little like the other gate entrance—”

“No, it’s like it all looks familiar,” she says. “Like this part of the campus looks familiar. Like I was here more than once, or something. It feels familiar.”

She starts looking around.

“Let me get my bearings,” she says. “Let me figure out why this place looks familiar to me. Isn’t that the point of all this? That something here is supposed to look familiar?”

“Okay,” I say. “Take your time.”

I try to encourage her, even though I don’t want to stop here. I want to get to the churches before they close for the day. I want to find us someone to talk to.

I stay quiet and focus on my phone. I focus on figuring out the time line. If Bailey is onto something, if we aren’t walking completely down the wrong path, it has to have been in 2008 that Bailey was here—while Bailey and Owen were still living in Seattle, while Olivia was still alive. The next year, Bailey and Owen moved to Sausalito. And any time before that, she would have been too young to remember much of this, if any of it.

So 2008 was the sweet spot. If Bailey is right about any of it, that’s when she was here. I search for the football schedule. I search for the home game schedule, from twelve years ago.

But as I start to pull the past schedules up, my cell rings, BLOCKED coming up on the caller ID. I hold it in my hand, unsure what to do. It could be Owen. But I think of Jake telling me not to answer any unknown numbers, and it feels risky. Who else it may be, what other trouble that may cause.

Bailey motions to my phone. “Are you going to get that? Or just stare at it?”

“Haven’t decided yet.”

What if it’s Owen though? What if? I click accept. But I don’t say anything, waiting to hear what the caller has to say first.

“Hello? Hannah?”

The woman on the other end has a high-pitched voice, lispy, irritating. It’s a voice that I recognize.

“Belle,” I say.

“Oh what a mess this is,” she says. “What an outrage. Are you okay? And how is Owen’s daughter?”

It’s Belle’s attempt to be nice, but I note that she doesn’t say Bailey. She says Owen’s daughter because she can never remember Bailey’s name. It’s never been important to her to learn it.

“They didn’t do this thing, you know…” she says.

They.

“Belle, I’ve been trying to reach you,” I say.

“I know, I know, you must be beside yourself. I’m beside myself. I’m holed up in St. Helena like some kind of common criminal. Camera crews camped outside my door. I can’t even leave the house! I had to have my assistant drop off roasted chicken and chocolate soufflés from Bouchon so I’d have something to eat,” she says. “Where are you?”

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.”