The Last Thing He Told Me

“Then where is he? And where did he get this money!”

She is yelling at me because she wants to be yelling at him. It’s a feeling I can relate to. I’m just as angry as you are, I want to say. And the person I want to say it to is Owen.

I look at her. Then I turn away, stare out the window, out at the docks, the bay, at all the night-lit houses in this strange little neighborhood. I can see directly into the Hahns’ floating home. Mr. and Mrs. Hahn are sitting on the couch, side by side, eating their nightly bowls of ice cream, watching television.

“What do I do now, Hannah?” she says. My name hangs there like an accusation.

Bailey pushes her hair behind her ears, and I can see her lip start to quiver. It is so strange and unexpected—Bailey has never cried in front of me—that I almost reach out to hold her to me, like it’s something we do.

Protect her.

I unbuckle my seat belt. Then I reach over and unbuckle hers. Simple movements.

“Let’s go into the house and I’ll make some phone calls,” I say. “Someone’s going to know where your father is. We’ll start there. We’ll start by finding him, so he can explain this all.”

“Okay,” she says.

She opens her car door and steps outside. But she turns back to look at me, her eyes blazing.

“But Bobby’s coming over,” she says. “I won’t say anything about my father’s special delivery, but I really want him here.”

She isn’t asking. What choice do I have anyway, even if she were? “Just stay downstairs, okay?”

She shrugs, which is as close to an agreement as we are going to reach on the matter. And before I can worry too much about it, I see a car pulling up, headlights blinking at us, bright and demanding.

My first thought is: Owen. Please be Owen. But my second thought feels more precise and I prepare myself. It’s the police. It has to be the police. They’re probably here to find Owen—to gather information about his involvement in his firm’s criminal activities, to assess what I know about his employment at The Shop, and about his current whereabouts. As if I have any information to pass along to them.

But I’m wrong on that count too.

The lights go off and I see that it’s a bright blue Mini Cooper and I know it’s Jules. It’s my oldest friend, Jules, hustling out of her Mini Cooper and racing toward me at top speed, her arms wide and outstretched. She is hugging us, hugging both Bailey and me, as hard as she can.

“Hello, my loves,” she says.

Bailey hugs her back. Even Bailey loves Jules, despite the fact that I’m the one who brought her into Bailey’s life. This is who Jules is to everyone who is lucky enough to know her. Comforting, steady.

It may be why of everything I’m guessing she’ll say to me in that moment, the one thing I don’t expect is what actually comes out of her mouth.

“It’s all my fault,” she says.

Think What You Want

“I still can’t believe this is happening,” Jules says.

We sit in the kitchen, at the small breakfast table in the sun nook, drinking coffee spiked with bourbon. Jules is on her second mug, her oversize sweatshirt concealing her small frame, her hair pulled back in two low pigtails. They make her look like she is trying to get away with something, sneaking some more bourbon into the mug. They make her look a little like her fourteen-year-old self, the girl I met our first day of high school.

My grandfather had just moved us from Tennessee to Peekskill, New York—a small town on the Hudson River. Jules’s family had moved there from New York City. Her father was an investigative journalist for the New York Times—a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist—not that Jules had any airs about her. We met while applying for after-school jobs at Lucky’s, a local dog-walking service. We were both hired. And we took to walking our assigned dogs together every afternoon. We must have been a sight: two small girls, fifteen rowdy dogs surrounding us at any given time.

I was a freshman at the public high school. Jules was at a prestigious private school a few miles away. But those afternoons were just the two of us together. I’m still not sure how we would have gotten through high school without each other. We were so removed from each other’s actual lives that we told each other everything. Jules once compared it to how you confide in a stranger you meet on a plane. From the beginning, this is what we’ve been to each other: safe, airborne. Complete with a thirty-thousand-foot perspective.

That hasn’t changed, now that we’re the grown-ups. Jules has followed in her father’s footsteps and works for a newspaper. She’s a photo editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, focusing primarily on sports. She eyes me, worried. But I’m eyeing Bailey in the living room, snuggled into Bobby on the couch, the two of them talking low. It seems harmless. And still, my thought is, I have no idea what harmless looks like. This is the first time Bobby has been over when Owen hasn’t been home. This is the first time when it’s been up to me alone.

I try to check on them while pretending not to check on them. But Bailey must feel my gaze. She looks up at me, less than pleased. Then she stands up and deliberately closes the glass living room door with a thud. I can still see her, so it’s more of a ceremonial slamming. But it’s a slamming all the same.

“We were sixteen once too, you know,” Jules says.

“Not like that,” I say.

“We only wish,” she says. “Purple hair rocks.”