The Last Thing He Told Me

Grady laughs. “I would think if this taught you anything it’s that no one knows who they marry,” he says.

“I disagree,” I say. “If Owen wanted me to sit still and let you run this, he would have said so.”

“So how do you explain the email correspondence he sent me? The detailed files he kept? They’re going to help ensure that Avett is punished for his crimes. The FBI is already into a plea deal that is going to put Avett away for the next twenty years…” he says. “How do you explain your husband doing that? How do you explain away his setting everything up so he could enter witness protection?”

“I think he did that for another reason.”

“What’s that?” he says. “His legacy?”

“No,” I say. “Bailey’s.”

He smirks, and I can hear all the things he wants to tell me but feels like he can’t tell me. I can hear all the things he knows about Owen—the same things

Nicholas knows, but with a different sheen on them. Maybe he thinks telling me something closer to the truth will move me closer to his side. I’ve already picked a side though. Bailey’s. And mine.

“I’m going to say this as simply as I can,” he says. “Nicholas is a bad fucking man. He is going to punish you one day. Bailey may be safe, but if he can’t get to Owen, he’ll punish you in order to hurt him. You’re completely expendable to him. He doesn’t care about you.”

“I don’t think he does,” I say.

“So then you have to know how risky this is for you to just try and go back to your life?” he says. “I can only protect you if you let me.”

I don’t answer him, because he wants me to say yes—yes, I’ll let him protect me. Yes, I’ll let him protect us. And I’m not going to say that. I’m not going to say it because I know this much is true: he can’t.

Nicholas can probably get to us anyway, if that’s what he wants to do. That’s what this all has taught me. One way or another, things come back. Things just came back. So I may as well take a shot at doing the best thing for Bailey. And, by doing it this way, Bailey gets to stay Bailey.

No one gave her that choice before. She is already losing so much. The least I can do is give it to her now.

Grady starts the car up again, heads back into traffic. “You can’t trust him. It’s crazy for you to think you can. You cannot make a deal with the devil and expect it to turn out okay.”

I turn away from him, look out the window. “Except I just did.”

Finding My Way Back to Her

Bailey sits in the conference room. She is crying hard.

And before I even reach for her, she jumps up and races toward me. She holds tightly to me, her head in the crook of my neck.

I hold her like that, ignoring Grady, ignoring everything but her. She pulls away, and I take in her face, her eyes swollen from crying, her hair sticking to her head. She looks like the little girl version of herself, needing more than anything for someone to tell her that she is safe now.

“I shouldn’t have left the room,” she says.

I push her hair off her face. “Where did you go?”

“I shouldn’t have gone anywhere,” she says. “I’m sorry. But I thought I heard a knock on the door, which completely freaked me out. And then my cell phone rang and I picked it up. And there was all this static. I kept saying hello and getting that static. And so I went into the hall to see if I could hear any better, and I don’t know…”

“You kept going?” I say.

She nods.

Grady shoots me a look, like I’m out of bounds to comfort her. Like I’m simply out of bounds. This is how he sees things now. His plan for Owen and Bailey is on one side of a line and I’m on the other. This is the only way he sees me now—as the main impetus toward his imagined solution.

“I thought it was my father on the phone. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the static, or the blocked number. I just felt it strongly that he was trying to reach me and so I thought I’d walk for a minute, see if he tried me again. And when he didn’t, I just… kept going. I didn’t think too much about it.”

I don’t ask her why she didn’t at least let me know before she left that she was okay. Maybe she didn’t trust that I would let her do what she needed to do. That was probably a part of it. But I knew the other part wasn’t about me, so I decide not to make it about me now. It’s never about someone else the moment you realize it is up to you to get yourself to a better place. It’s only about figuring out how to get there.

“I went back to the library,” she says. “I went back to campus. I had Professor Cookman’s roster with me and I just started going through the yearbook archive again. We ran out of there so fast after seeing the photograph of… Kate. And I just thought… I thought I needed to know. Before I left Austin.”

“And did you find him?”