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 anything so that Bailey didn’t have to be in. We are here together and we both want to keep going. We both want to find Owen, whatever he has been hiding—wherever he is now.

“Now,” I say. “We fix this.”

Two Can Play at That Game

I wait until the morning to call him. I wait until I feel calm and I’m sure I can do what I need to do.

I gather up all of my notes and throw on a sundress. I close the door to the hotel room quietly, careful not to wake Bailey. Then I head downstairs, through the bustling lobby, and go outside, where I can walk along the street, where I can control better what he hears in the background.

It is still quiet out—the lake placid and peaceful—even with the morning rush, commuters on their way over the Congress Street Bridge, heading into their offices, their children’s schools, on their way to start their blessedly normal days.

I reach into my pocket and pull out the napkin from Fred’s, Grady’s cell phone number underlined twice.

I turn on my cell phone, pressing *67 first before I tap in the number, hoping this will help block my call a little bit longer—if he is so inclined to unblock it, if he’s so inclined to try and figure out where I am.

“This is Grady,” he says when he picks up.

I brace myself to lie. This is, after all, what there is left to do. “It’s Hannah,” I say. “I heard from Owen.”

This instead of hello.

“When?” Grady says.

“Late last night, around two A.M. He said he couldn’t talk in case someone was listening to the call. Tracking him. He called from a pay phone or something. It came up as a blocked number and he was talking fast. He wanted to know if I was okay, if Bailey was okay, and he was adamant that he didn’t have any part in what is going on at The Shop. He said he’d had a feeling Avett was up to something, but he didn’t know the depth of it.”

I can hear Grady on the other end of the phone, rustling around. Maybe he is looking for a notepad, something on which to write down the clues he seems to think I’m going to give him.

“Tell me what he said exactly…” he says.

“He said it wasn’t safe for him to stay on the phone, but that I should call you,” I say. “That you’d tell me the truth.”

The rustling stops. “The truth? About what?”

“I don’t know, Grady. Owen made it sound like you’d know how to answer that.”

Grady pauses. “It’s early in California,” he says. “What are you doing up so early?”

“Would you be able to go back to sleep if your husband called you at two A.M. and told you he was in trouble?”

“I’m a pretty good sleeper, so…” he says.

“I need to know what’s going on, Grady. What’s really going on here,” I say. “Why does a U.S. marshal based in Austin, Texas, come all the way to San Francisco seeking out someone who isn’t a suspect?”

“And I need to know why you’re lying to me about Owen calling you when he obviously did not.”

“Why are there no records of Owen Michaels before he got to Sausalito?” I say.

“Who told you that?” he said.

“A friend.”

“A friend? You’re getting some faulty information from your friend,” he says.

“I don’t think so,” I say.

“Okay, well, did you remind your friend that one of the primary functions of The Shop’s new software is to alter your online history? That it helps you erase a trail you don’t want to leave, correct? No online trail as to who you are. That includes online databases to universities, housing records—”

“I know how the software works.”

“So why hasn’t it occurred to you that if anyone expunged Owen’s record, it might have been the one man who has the capability to do so?”

Owen. He is saying Owen made the trail to his past run cold. “Why would he do that?” I say.

“Maybe he was testing out his software,” he says. “I don’t know. I’m just saying you’re making up quite an elaborate story when there are a variety of explanations as to what your friend did or didn’t find out about Owen’s past.”

He is trying to throw me off-balance. I won’t let him. I won’t let him try to control this narrative for his own agenda, which is feeling increasingly suspicious.

“What did he do, Grady? Before all of this? Before The Shop? Why did he change his identity? Why did he change his name?”