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 impatience, thinking of all the times Bailey has rolled her eyes at this story—at how Owen has used it as a teaching opportunity. He’s used it to convince Bailey to stick with something that matters to her, to commit to her plan. He’s used it when he was trying to convince her of the opposite.

“You know this story, Bailey. The professor taught that impossible course in gauge theory and global analysis. Your father loves talking about him. The professor who told him that he was the worst student he’d ever had. And how that actually made Owen want to do better. How it focused him?”

Bailey starts nodding, a slow recognition. “You mean the guy who put my father’s midterm on the bulletin board, right…?” she says. “So he wouldn’t forget all the ways he could improve.”

“Exactly, yes!”

“Sometimes your passion takes work and you shouldn’t give up on it just because it isn’t easy…” She takes on Owen’s voice, imitating him. “Sometimes, kid, you need to work harder to get to a better place.”

“That’s it. Yes. That’s him. I think his first name was Tobias but I need to know his full name. Please tell me you remember it.”

“Why?” she says.

“Just, can you remember it, Bailey?”

“He called him by his last name sometimes. A nickname for his last name. But it started with a J… didn’t it?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“No, I don’t think that was it… It was Cook… He called him Cook. So maybe it was Cooker?” she says. “Or was it Cookman?”

I smile, almost laughing out loud. She’s right. I know it as soon as I hear it. It’s good to know I wasn’t even close.

“What’s so funny?” she says. “You’re freaking me out.”

“Nothing, that’s great. That’s what I needed to know,” I say. “Go back to sleep.”

“I don’t want to,” she says. “Tell me what you figured out.”

I open my phone and I plug his name into the search engine. How many professors with the name Tobias Cookman could there be who teach college-level mathematics? And more specifically gauge theory and global analysis?

One that I find, one who is teaching theoretical mathematics. One who has dozens of accolades and awards for his teaching. One who, from the set of photographs that pop up, looks just as surly as Owen has described him. Wrinkled brow, a deep frown. And, for some reason, in many of the photographs he is also perpetually clad in red cowboy boots.

Professor Tobias “Cook” Cookman.

He has never worked at Princeton University.

But for the last twenty-nine years, he has been on the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin.

It’s Science, Isn’t It?

We take a cab this time.

Bailey stares down at her hands, not blinking, looking more than a little stunned. I’m spinning too, working to hold my center. It’s one thing when a private investigator intuits that your husband’s name is different, that the details of his life are different. But if this pans out—if Owen took this class with this Professor Cookman—it’s our first piece of proof, real proof, that Owen lied about the story of his life. It’s the first proof that my instinct was right, that his story, Owen’s real story, somehow may begin and end in Austin. It feels like a victory that we are moving closer to the truth. But when the truth is taking you somewhere you don’t want to go, you also aren’t sure. You aren’t sure you want that win.

The cab pulls up to the College of Natural Sciences—a collection of buildings that’s bigger and more expansive than my entire liberal arts college, campus and dorms included.

I turn and look at Bailey. She is taking in the buildings—the relaxed green running through and around them.

Even considering the circumstances, it’s hard not to be impressed, especially when we get out of the car and start walking through the green and over the small bridge that leads to the Department of Mathematics.

The building that is home to UT’s mathematics, physics, and astronomy departments. The ego wall proudly showcases that this building graduates hundreds of the most impressive science and math students in America each year. And it’s also home to Nobel Prize winners, Wolf Prize winners, Abel Prize winners, Turing Award winners, and Fields Medal winners.

Including our Fields Medal winner, Professor Cookman.

As we take the escalator up to his office, we see a large poster of Professor Cookman’s face. Same frown, same wrinkled brow.

The poster reads: TEXAS SCIENTISTS CHANGE THE WORLD. And it lists some of Professor Cookman’s research, some of his awards. Fields Medal winner. Finalist for the Wolf.

We arrive in front of his office and Bailey cues up her phone to a photograph of Owen, the oldest photograph either of us has with us in Texas—in the hope that Professor Cookman is someone who is willing to look at it.