The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave (bill gates books to read .txt) 📗

on someone. You learn it in the moments when everyone’s too tired to be sweet, too tired to try hard. You learn it by what they do for you then.

And what I’m going to do for her now is what my grandfather did for me. I’ll do whatever it takes for her to feel that she is safe.

“So… it wasn’t just him, right?” she says. “If he did this, I’m not who he said I am either then, right? My name and everything… at some point he changed it.”

“Yes,” I say. “If Jake’s correct, then, yes, you used to go by something else as well.”

“And all the details are different too, right?” She pauses. “Like… my birthday?”

That stops me. The heartbreak in her voice when she asks that question.

“Like my birthday’s not really my birthday?” she says.

“No, probably not.”

She looks down. She looks away from me. “That seems like something a person should know about themselves,” she says.

I fight back tears, gripping the table, the small table in this happy Austin restaurant—paintings on the wall, bright colors, all of it completely antithetical to how I feel. I will myself to stop, blinking the tears back. A sixteen-year-old girl, who apparently has no one but me, needs me not to cry. She needs me to be there for her. So I pull myself together, giving her the space to fall apart. Letting her be the one to do that.

She folds her hands on the table, tears filling her eyes. And I feel nearly leveled by it, watching her in that kind of pain.

“Bailey, I know this feels impossible,” I say. “But you are you. Whatever details are around that, whatever your father didn’t tell you, that doesn’t change who you are. Not at your core.”

“But how can I have no memory of being called something else? Of where I lived? I should remember, shouldn’t I?”

“You just said it yourself, you were a kid. You were just coming into consciousness when you became Bailey Michaels. None of this is a reflection on you at all.”

“Just on him?” she says.

I think again about the guy at the Berkeley Flea Market, the guy who called Owen a prom king. Owen’s calm reaction to him. He was completely unfazed. Could he have faked that so well? And what did it say about him if he did?

“You don’t remember anyone ever calling your father anything else, do you? Before Sausalito?”

“Like a nickname?” she says.

“No, more like… by another name completely?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know…” She pushes her coffee across the table. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

“I know.”

She starts twirling her hair in her hands, the purple getting mixed up with her dark nail polish, her eyes blinking wildly as she tries to think.

“I have no idea what anyone called him,” she says. “I never paid attention, why would I?”

She sits back, done guessing about her father, done guessing about her past, and completely exhausted from feeling like she has to. Who can blame her? Who wants to be sitting in a strange Austin restaurant trying to figure out who the most important person in your world was pretending to be? And how you missed it. Who he actually was.

“You know what? Let’s just go,” I say. “It’s late. Let’s go back to the hotel and try to get some sleep.”

I start to stand up, but Bailey stops me. “Wait…” she says.

I sit back down.

“Bobby said something to me a couple months ago,” she says. “He was applying to college and wanted to ask my father for an alumni recommendation for Princeton. But when he looked him up in the list of alums, he said he couldn’t find an Owen Michaels anywhere. Not as a graduate in the engineering school, not as a student in the regular college either. I said obviously he looked it up in the wrong place, and then he got into University of Chicago and just dropped it. I never even remembered to ask Dad, but I just assumed it was Bobby not knowing how to work the alumni database or whatever.” She pauses. “Maybe I should have asked him.”

“Bailey, why would you? Why would you assume he was lying to you?”

“Do you think he was ever going to tell me?” she says. “Did he plan to take me for a walk one day and let me in on who I really am? Honestly, was he going to tell me that basically everything I knew about my life was a lie?”

I look at her in the dim light. I think of my conversation with Owen, the conversation about taking a vacation to New Mexico. Was he actually thinking of letting me into some of this then? If I’d pushed a little harder, would he have?

“I don’t know,” I say.

I expect her to say how unfair that is. I expect her to get upset again. But she stays calm.

“What’s he so scared of?” she says.

It stops me. Because that’s it. That feels like the crux of all of this. Owen is running from something that he is terrified of. He has spent his life running from it. And, more important, he has spent his entire life trying to keep Bailey from it.

“I think when we figure that out, we’ll know where he is now,” I say.

“Oh, well, easy enough,” she says.

Then she laughs. But the laughter turns, fast, tears filling her eyes. But just as I think she is going to say that she wants to get out of here—that she wants to go back to the hotel, to go back to Sausalito—she seems to find her center. She seems to find something like resolve.

“So what do we do now?” she says.

We. What do we do now. We are in this together, it seems, which warms my heart, even if it’s taken us to this all-night diner in South Austin, far from our home. Even if it’s taken us into territory we never wanted to be in. That I would give