“What did you just say?” he says.

“He loves to tell this story about how he struggled in your class and, after killing himself studying for the midterm, you told him that you were going to keep his exam in a frame in your office as a lesson to future students. Not as a how-to on applying yourself, but more like, at least I’m not as bad as that guy is.”

He stays quiet. I keep talking, filling the silence.

“Maybe that is something you do with a student every year, especially since you had him so early on, and really by then who could have been a worst anything? But it worked with him. He believed you. And instead of it frustrating him, it made him want to work harder. To prove himself to you.”

He still doesn’t say anything.

Bailey reaches for my arm, like that is something she does, trying to pull me back, to let him go.

“He doesn’t know,” she says. “We should go.”

She is eerily calm, which is somehow worse than when I thought she was going to lose it.

But Professor Cookman isn’t moving, even though he is off the hook.

“I did frame it,” he says.

“What?” Bailey says.

“His exam. I did frame it.”

He starts walking toward us.

“It was my second year teaching and I wasn’t much older than the kids were. I was trying to prove my authority. My wife eventually made me take the exam down and throw it out. She said it was too mean for a crappy midterm to be any student’s legacy. I didn’t see it that way, at first. She is smarter than I am. I kept that thing framed for a long time. It scared the crap out of my other students, which was really the point.”

“No one wanted to be that bad?” I say.

“Even when I told them how good he became afterward,” he says.

He reaches his hand out for Bailey’s phone, Bailey handing it over, both of us watching as he tries to put something together.

“What did he do?” he says. “Your father?”

He directs his question to Bailey. I think she is going to offer an abbreviated version of what is happening at The Shop and with Avett Thompson—and say that we don’t know the rest of the story yet. We don’t know how he fits into the fraud there, or why it led to him leaving us here alone, trying to put the pieces together. These impossible pieces. But, instead, she shakes her head and tells him the worst part of what Owen has done.

“He lied to me,” she says.

He nods, like that is enough for him. Professor Cookman. First name Tobias. Nickname Cook. Award-winning mathematician. Our new friend.

“Come with me,” he says.

Some Students Are Better Than Others

Professor Cookman takes us back to his office, where he puts on a pot of coffee, and Cheryl, the graduate student manning his desk, is much more attentive than earlier. She powers on several computers on Cook’s workstation as a second graduate student, Scott, starts going through Cook’s filing cabinet—both of them moving as quickly as they can.

While Cheryl downloads a copy of Owen’s photograph onto the professor’s laptop, Scott pulls out an enormous file, slamming the cabinet closed, and then walks back over to the desk.

“The exams you have in here only go back to 2001. These are from 2001–2002.”

“Then why are you handing them to me?” he says. “What am I supposed to do with these?”

Scott looks dumbstruck as Cheryl puts the laptop on Professor Cookman’s desk.

“Go and check the filing cabinets in the archives,” he says. “Then call the registrar and get me the class list from 1995. Also get 1994 and 1996, just to be thorough.”

Scott and Cheryl head out of the office, tasked, and Cook turns to his laptop, Owen’s photograph covering the screen.

“So what kind of trouble is your father in?” he says. “If I may ask.”

“He works at The Shop,” Bailey says.

“The Shop?” he says. “Avett Thompson’s operation?”

“Exactly,” I say. “He did most of the coding.”

He looks confused. “Coding? That’s surprising. If your father is the same person that I taught, he was more interested in mathematical theory. He wanted to work for the university. He wanted to work in academia. Coding’s not a natural extension of that, really.”

That may be why he decided to do it, I almost say. It was a way to hide in a field adjacent to the field he was interested in, but far enough away that no one would look for him there.

“Is he officially a suspect?” Cook asks.

“No,” I say. “Not officially.”

He motions toward Bailey. “I imagine you’re just interested in finding your father. Either way.”

She nods. And Cook turns his attention to me.

“And how does the name change fit in, exactly?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” I say. “He may have been in trouble before The Shop. We don’t know. We’re only just learning about all the inconsistencies between what he’s told us and…”

“What’s true?”

“Yes,” I say.

Then I turn and look at Bailey, to see how she’s processing that. She looks back at me, as if to say, It’s okay. Not that she is okay with what’s going on, exactly—but maybe that it’s okay, all the same, that I’m trying to get to the bottom of things.

Professor Cookman stares at the computer screen, not saying anything at first. “You don’t remember all of them, but I do remember him,” he says. “Though I remember him having longer hair. And being much heavier. He looks quite different.”

“But not entirely?” I say.

“No,” he says. “Not entirely.”

I take that in—trying to imagine Owen walking through the world, looking the way Professor Cookman is describing. I try to imagine Owen walking through the world as someone else. I look over at Bailey and I can see it on her face. I can see it in her frown. How she’s doing the same thing.

Professor Cookman closes the laptop and leans across the desk, toward us.

“Look, I’m not going to pretend to imagine what this all feels like, but I will say, for whatever it’s worth, in my years of teaching, I’ve discovered one thing above all else that makes me calm in moments like this. It’s an Einstein theory originally, which is why it sounds better in German.”

“You may have to go with English,” Bailey says.

“Einstein said, So far as the theories of mathematics are about reality, they are not certain; so far as they are certain, they are not about reality.”

Bailey tilts her head. “Still waiting on the English there, Professor,” she says.

“It basically means, we don’t know shit about anything,” he says.

Bailey laughs—softly but genuinely—and it’s the first time she’s laughed in days, the first time she’s laughed since this all started.

I’m so grateful that I almost leap over the table to hug Professor Cookman.

Before I do, Scott and Cheryl walk back into the office.

“Here’s the roster from the spring semester, 1995. In 1994, you were teaching two different senior seminars. And in ’96 you taught graduate students exclusively. Spring ’95 was when you taught underclassmen. So that’s the class the student would have been in.”

Cheryl hands over the roster triumphantly.

“There were seventy-three people in the class,” she says. “Eighty-three the first day, but then ten dropped out. That is pretty common in terms of normal attrition. I’m assuming you don’t need the names of the ten who dropped?”

“No,” he says.

“That’s what I figured, so I went ahead and crossed those out for you,” she says, like she just discovered something smaller than the atom. And, in my book, she has.

As Professor Cookman studies the list, Cheryl turns to us. “There’s not an Owen on the list. Or even a Michaels on the list.”

“That’s not a surprise,” he says.

Cook keeps his eyes on the list, but he shakes his head.

“I’m sorry I don’t remember his name,” he says. “You think I would know, having had his work framed above my head for all that time.”

“It was a long time ago,” I say.

“Still. It’d be far more helpful if I could recall that much, but these names aren’t adding up to anything for me.”

Professor Cookman hands the list over and I take it from him, gratefully and quickly, before he changes his mind.

“Seventy-three names are a whole lot more manageable than a billion. This is a whole lot more manageable than having nowhere to start.”

“Assuming he’s on there,” Professor Cookman says.

“Yes, assuming that.”

I look down at the printout, seventy-three names staring back at me—fifty of them men. Bailey peers over my shoulder to look too. We need to find a way to go through them as quickly as possible. But I am more hopeful than I have been that we have somewhere to start from. That we have a list of names to cull from, Owen somewhere among them. I feel certain of this.

“You don’t know how much we appreciate this,” I say. “Thank you.”

“My pleasure,” he says. “I hope it helps.”