The Last Thing He Told Me

Then he gave me an apologetic look: I’m sorry she’s being like this.

I shrugged: It’s really okay, however she wants to be.

I meant it. It was okay with me. She was a teenager who hadn’t had a mother for most of her life. All she had was her father. I didn’t expect her to be good with the prospect of sharing him with someone else. I didn’t think anyone else should expect that of her either.

She looked down, embarrassed. “Sorry I just… have a lot of homework to do,” she said.

“No, please, it’s fine,” I said. “I have a ton of work to do too. Why don’t you two go to the play? Just you and your dad. And maybe we’ll meet up back at the hotel, if you end up getting your work done?”

She looked at me, waiting for the catch. There was none. I wanted her to understand that. Regardless of what I was going to do right in terms of her, and what I was going to do wrong (and based on how things were starting, I knew I was going to do a lot that she considered wrong), there was never going to be a catch. That was a promise I could make her. As far as I was concerned, she didn’t have to be nice. She didn’t have t

o pretend. She only had to be herself.

“Honestly, Bailey. No pressure either way…” I said.

Owen reached over and took my hand. “I’d really like us to all go together,” he said.

“Next time,” I said. “We’ll do it next time.”

Bailey looked up. And I saw it there before she could hide it. I saw it in her eyes, like a secret she didn’t mean to let me in on—her gratitude that I had understood her. I saw how much she needed someone to understand her, someone besides her father. How she thought it for just a second—that just maybe that someone might turn out to be me.

“Yeah,” she said. “Next time.”

And, for the first time, she smiled at me.

You Have to Do Some Things on Your Own

We walk down the long hallway lined with those art photographs, passing by one of the California Coast. The gorgeous coast near Big Sur. The photograph is at least seven feet long, a bird’s-eye view of that almost impossible stretch of road carved into the divide of steep mountain, rock, and ocean. I’m so focused on it, taking some comfort in the familiar landscape, that I almost miss it when we pass the dining room. I almost miss the dining room table inside. My dining room table—the one that was featured in Architectural Digest. The table that helped launch my career.

It’s my most reproduced piece. A big box store even started replicating the table after the AD feature came out.

It stops me. Nicholas said his wife carefully picked every piece of furniture in this house. What if she came across the feature in Architectural Digest? What if that was what led her to the table? It was possible. The feature was still on their website. Enough clicks in recent years could have led her to her lost granddaughter, if she had been searching closely enough, if she had only known what to be searching for.

Enough moves, after all, led me here, to this house I don’t want to be in—a piece of my past finding me here, as if I need another reminder that everything that matters in my life is at the mercy of what happens now.

Nicholas pulls open a thick, oak door and holds it for me.

I avoid looking back at Ned, who is a couple of feet behind us. I avoid looking at the drooling dogs, who stroll by his side.

I follow Nicholas into his home office and take it in—the dark leather chairs and reading lamps, the mahogany bookshelves. Encyclopedias and classic books line the shelves. Nicholas Bell’s diplomas and accolades hang on the walls. Summa cum laude. Phi Beta Kappa. Law Review. They are framed, proudly.

His office feels different from the rest of the house. It feels more personal. The room is filled with photographs of his family—on the walls, on the credenza, on the bookshelves. The desk is devoted entirely to photographs of Bailey, though. Photographs that are framed in sterling silver, photographs that are blown up into twice their normal sizes. They are all of small Bailey with her dark eyes, wide like saucers. And her tender curls—none of them yet purple.

Then there is her mother, Kate. She holds Bailey in nearly every photograph displayed: Bailey and Kate eating ice cream; Bailey and Kate cuddling on a park bench. I focus on one of Bailey at a few days old, in a little blue beanie. Kate lies in bed with her, her lips to Bailey’s lips, her forehead against her forehead. It just about breaks my heart. And I assume that is why Nicholas keeps it in his view—why he keeps all of them in view—so every day they will just about break his.

This is the thing about good and evil. They aren’t so far apart—and they often start from the same valiant place of wanting something to be different.

Ned remains in the hallway. Nicholas nods in his direction, and he closes the door. The thick, oak door. The bodyguard is in the hallway, the dogs in the hallway.

And the two of us are inside the office, alone.

Nicholas walks over to the bar and pours us each a drink. Then he hands mine over and takes a seat behind his desk, leaving me the chair in front of it—a deep, leather chair with gold etchings.

“Make yourself comfortable,” he says.

I sit down with my drink in my hand. But I’m not happy about having my back to the door. I have the thought, for a second, that it isn’t impossible someone could walk in and shoot me. One of the bodyguards could surprise me, the dogs could spring to action. Charlie himself could storm in. Maybe I have misunderstood what Owen put in his will. Maybe in this attempt to get Bailey and Owen out of what I have gotten them deeper into, I have left myself alone in the lion’s den. A sacrifice. In the name of Kate. Or Owen. Or Bailey.

I remind myself that’s okay. If I do what I came here to do, I’ll accept that.