The Last Thing He Told Me

I hold his gaze but relent, knowing he’s right.

I walk back over to the windows and look outside, as though there is something I can do—as though I’ll spot Bailey somewhere on the street below. I don’t know who I’m looking at—the myriad of people walking through nighttime Austin. The sliver of moon, the only light, makes it feel even more terrifying that Bailey is roaming among them.

“What if he took her?” I say.

“Nicholas?” he says.

I nod, my head starting to spin. I go obsessively over everything I know about him now—how dangerous he is, the heights Owen went to get away from him. To keep his daughter away from Nicholas’s world. How I’ve brought her back.

Protect her.

“That’s unlikely,” Grady says.

“But not impossible?”

“I guess nothing is impossible, now that you brought her to Austin.”

I try to comfort myself, something Grady apparently has no desire to do. “He couldn’t have found us so quickly…” I say.

“No, probably not.”

“How did you even find us?” I ask.

“Well, your call this morning didn’t help. And then I heard from your lawyer, a Jake Anderson, in New York City. He told me you were in Austin and he couldn’t reach you. That you went dark and he was worried. So I put a trace on you. Clearly not soon enough…”

I turn and look at him.

“Why on earth would you come to Austin?” he says.

“You showed up at my house, for starters,” I say. “I found that suspicious.”

“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 ha

ve 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.”