The Last Thing He Told Me

I close my eyes. How am I here again? On the phone with Jake? How is Jake the one who is helping me? When we ended our relationship, Jake said I’d always felt absent to him. I didn’t argue with him—I couldn’t. Because I was a little absent. It had felt like something was missing with Jake. The very thing I’d thought I had with Owen. But if Jake is correct about Owen, then Owen and I didn’t have what I thoug

ht we did. Maybe we didn’t have anything close to it, at all.

“I appreciate the offer. And right now it doesn’t sound so bad.”

“But…” he says.

“From what you’re telling me, we got here because Owen ran away,” I say. “I can’t run away too, not until I get to the bottom of this.”

“Hannah, you really need to think of Bailey here.”

I open the hotel room door and peek in. Bailey is sound asleep on her bed. She is curled up in the fetal position, her purple hair sticking out like a disco ball on the pillows. I close the door, step back into the hall.

“That’s all I’m thinking of, Jake,” I say.

“Not yet it’s not,” he says. “Or you wouldn’t be trying to find the one person that in my opinion you should be keeping her away from.”

“Jake, he’s her father,” I say.

“Maybe someone should remind him,” he says.

I don’t say anything. I look out over the glass walls and into the atrium below. Work colleagues (complete with their laminated conference name tags) are lounging in the hotel bar, couples are heading out of the restaurant hand in hand, two exhausted parents are carrying their sleeping children and enough LEGOLAND paraphernalia to open a store. From this far away, they all look happy. Though, of course, I don’t really know. But, for just a moment, I wish I could be any of them as opposed to the person I am. Hiding in a hotel hallway, eight floors up. Trying to process that her marriage, her life, is a lie.

I feel anger surging inside of me. Ever since my mother left, I pride myself on the details, seeing the smallest things about a person. And if someone asked me three days ago, I would have said I know everything there is to know about Owen. Everything that matters anyway. But maybe I know nothing. Because here I am, struggling to figure out the most basic details of all.

“Sorry,” Jake says. “That was a little harsh.”

“That was a little harsh?”

“Look, I’m just saying that you’ve got a place here if you decide you want it,” he says. “Both of you do. No strings. But if you decide not to take me up on that, at least make another plan. Before you go ripping that girl’s life apart, convince her you know what you’re doing.”

“Who knows what they’re doing in a situation like this, Jake?” I say. “Who finds themselves in a situation like this?”

“Apparently you do,” he says.

“That’s helpful.”

“Come to New York,” he says. “That’s as helpful as I know how to be.”

Eight Months Ago

“I didn’t agree to this,” Bailey said.

We were standing outside a flea market in Berkeley. And Owen and Bailey were in a rare standoff. He wanted to go in. The only place Bailey wanted to go was home.

“You did agree,” Owen said. “When you agreed to come to San Francisco. So how about sucking it up?”

“I agreed to get dim sum,” she said.

“And the dim sum was good, wasn’t it?” he said. “I gave you my last pork bun. As a matter of fact, so did Hannah. That’s two extra pork buns.”

“What’s your point?” she says.

“How about being a good sport and heading inside with us for thirty minutes or so?”

She turned on her heels and walked into the flea market, ahead of us—the requisite ten feet ahead of us, so no one would guess we were all together.

She was done negotiating with her father. And, apparently, she was done celebrating my birthday.