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

the same thing. Avett doesn’t want to hear it,” he said. “What we need to make this all work.”

“My grandfather used to say that most people don’t want to hear the thing that will make it work better,” I said. “They want to hear what will make it easier.”

“And what did he say to do about that?”

“Find other people. You know, for starters.”

He tilted his head, took me in. “How do you always know what to say to me?” he said.

“Well, it’s really my grandfather saying it, but sure…” I said.

He reached for my hand, a smile spreading across his face. Like nothing happened, or at least like it wasn’t as important as he’d thought it was.

“Enough about this,” he said. “Let’s go see my chair.”

He started pulling me to the door, toward the backyard and the deck where the chair was drying—sanded, newly polished.

“You know you can’t have that chair,” I said. “Someone commissioned it. She is paying us a lot of money for it.”

“Good luck to her,” he said. “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”

I smiled. “What do you know about the law?”

“Enough to know if I’m sitting in that chair,” he said, “no one else is going to take it.”

Delete All History

At 10 A.M., the hotel café is already busy, the lights dimmed.

I sit at the bar, drinking an orange juice while most of the people around me are starting in on morning cocktails—mimosas and Bloody Marys, champagne, White Russians.

I stare at the row of televisions, all tuned to different news shows. They come at me in closed captions, most of them reporting on The Shop. PBS shows footage of Avett Thompson being handcuffed and escorted away. MSNBC has a preview of Belle’s Today show interview, Belle calling Avett’s arrest a travesty of justice. CNN’s chyron keeps warning that more indictments are coming, on repeat. It’s almost like a promise, mirroring Grady’s promise, that Owen will be in even more trouble soon. That whatever he is running from is about to catch him.

This is what gnaws at me, over and over, when I think of my husband—that something is coming for him, for all of us, that he couldn’t stop. That he has left me to try and stop it for him.

I take out my notepad and go back over what Grady said during our phone call—trying to recall every detail, trying to hone in on what may be important to glean from it. I keep coming back to how he said that Owen might have erased his own online history. And, as wrong as that feels, I try to move myself there, to that assumption, to see what it shows me.

Which is when I land on it. That there are certain things we can’t erase, certain things that we reveal to the people closest to us despite what we may or may not know we are telling them.

There are things, that without meaning to, Owen has told only me.

So I make another list. A list of everything I know about Owen’s past. Not the false facts—Newton, Princeton, Seattle. The other facts—the nonfacts: things I learned accidentally during our time together, things that in retrospect seem like strange encounters. Like the guy from Roosevelt High School. I look Roosevelt up, and find eighty-six of them spread across the United States. None of them are anywhere near Massachusetts. But eight of them—in places like San Antonio and Dallas—are spread out across Texas.

I put a pin in that and keep thinking, landing on the night with Owen at the hotel, the piggy bank on the bar. Which is when I realize something about that piggy bank—something I’ve been struggling to remember. Am I remembering it correctly now, or am I conjuring up the memory out of something like desperation? I shoot Jules a text to check it out for me and keep thinking.

I keep working my way through things only I know: the anecdotes and stories that Owen has told me late at night. Just the two of us. The way you only do with the person you’ve chosen, the witness to your life.

Those stories, the stories he shared when he didn’t even realize he was sharing, can’t all be false too. I refuse to believe it. I will refuse to believe it until I’m proven wrong.

I start rolling through them, Owen’s greatest hits: the time he took a boat trip down the Eastern Seaboard with his father, barely sixteen years old, the only time he ever spent several days alone with his father. The time during his senior year of high school that he let his girlfriend’s dog out to play and the dog ran away, Owen getting fired from his first job for spending that afternoon searching for the dog instead of returning to work. The time he snuck into the midnight screening of Star Wars with his pals, his parents awake at 2:45 A.M. when he finally walked in.

And a story he told me about college, about why he started to love engineering and technology so much. Owen’s freshman year of college, barely nineteen years old, he took a mathematics course with a professor he adored, someone he credited with his current career. Even though the professor told Owen he was the worst student he’d ever had. Had he told me what the professor’s name was? Tobias something. Was it Newton? Or was it Professor Newhouse? And didn’t he have a nickname he went by?

I race upstairs and back into the hotel room to wake Bailey—the one person who maybe has heard the story about this professor more times than I have.

I pull the comforter off and sit down on the edge of her bed.

“I’m sleeping,” she says.

“Not anymore,” I say.

She reluctantly props herself up against the headboard. “What is it?”

“Do you remember the name of your father’s professor? The one he loved so much, who taught him freshman year?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she says.

I fight my