Chapter 1
If You Can Forgive Me…
On the way out of the Pacific Design Center, Owen passes her.
This is the first time he has laid eyes on his daughter in person in more than five years.
Five years, ten months, and twenty-four days—to be exact.
Five birthdays and five Christmases and eight performances (Wicked and Carousel and Spring Awakening and Dear Evan Hanson and Waitress and Beautiful and Chicago and Carousel again) and two graduations (one high school, one college) and three new addresses and a summer in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and the start of her first job.
All these things between sixteen and twenty-two that mark it up, the start of a life.
Bailey’s hair is longer, her arms too thin. But, at the moment he passes her—he doesn’t turn to take a longer look; he won’t allow himself that luxury—it’s her skin that gets him.
Bailey is tan, if her skin were capable of tanning, her skin freckled and reddish, perhaps from the daily toll of life in Southern California, perhaps from spending too many days at the beach.
How is this possible? Hadn’t she always avoided the beach?
It nearly breaks him, such a small and obvious difference in who his daughter has become.
Seeing Bailey online didn’t give this away. Seeing Bailey online was a completely different thing.
Her social media account is now public, which Owen tells himself she’s done for his benefit.
He wouldn’t allow her to ever post photos before, but the rules are different now.
Owen imagines that Bailey knows this. There is no asking her.
Either way, he likes to believe the posts are a way of keeping them in conversation.
All he needs is a public computer and her handle and he can go to her page with no record of having gone there.
Her smile (how he loved every single thing about his kid’s smile) knocks the wind out of him, each and every time.
It’s almost like it’s directed at him: Look, Dad, I’m okay.
Look, Dad, you’re not here. Look, Dad, I’ll never forgive you.
Owen walks through the design center lobby, out the revolving doors, and onto Melrose.
There is a line of taxis idling. The driver in the first taxi shakes his head, still in the middle of a dinner break.
So Owen gets into the second cab and asks the driver to take him to the airport.
They are fighting early-evening Los Angeles traffic and it takes longer than expected to get there.
It doesn’t matter. He is plenty early for his flight and heads to the first-class lounge, flashes his mobile boarding pass, and goes into a single bathroom, where he locks the door.
He stares at himself in the mirror, takes his first deep breath. Steadies himself. Then he starts to take his clothes off. He strips off the button-down shirt he was wearing, puts on a plain T-shirt and leather jacket, swaps his combat boots for a pair of Converse sneakers. Just like his kid’s.
On the way to the lounge’s bar, he sees a janitor with her large garbage bin and tosses his old clothes inside. Then he takes a seat on the corner barstool, the farthest stool from anyone else, taking out a novel he has no intention of reading.
The bartender puts a wine list down in front of Owen. “What can I get you to drink?” he asks.
“Whatever red you’re pouring is fine.”
“That’s a mistake,” a woman says.
Owen looks up, sees the woman at the other end of the bar, smiling at him. She is pretty, with a short pixie cut, tortoiseshell glasses.
“Sorry?” he says.
“The wine. It’s a mistake. My flight’s delayed. Very delayed. So I’ve been working my way down the list of wines by the glass. They’re all bad.”
He opens his novel, tries to close off whatever conversation she wants to have.
But she moves down the bar, so she’s two stools away from him. “So where are you headed?”
“Business trip,” he says.
“International?”
He’s not surprised she guesses international. His New Zealand passport is sticking out of his book, complete with a name that doesn’t belong to him.
The bartender puts down the glass of wine in front of him along with a bowl of salty nuts. Owen nods a thank-you, takes a sip.
“Awful, isn’t it?”
“It’ll do.”
He offers a quick smile, turns back to his book.
“Should we try our luck at a bottle instead?”
“The thing is…” he says. “I’m married.”
She looks down at his hand, eyes his wedding band. “And what does that have to do with splitting a bottle of wine?”
But then she shrugs, as if to say she knows exactly what that has to do with it.
“Just trying to avoid any confusion,” Owen says.
“Lucky woman then. Your wife.”
He thinks of Hannah. He hasn’t allowed himself to think of her, not since leaving the design center.
Not since he was bending down next to her on the floor, helping pick up those scattered papers.
Her hand so near to his hand. Her hair against his face.
Her eyes giving her away, like they always had.
There was anger there. And confusion. And love. Was there still love beneath the rest?
He smiles. “Not sure that she would say that.”
“What would she say? Your wife?”
“I ask myself that all the time.”
Here’s the thing.
You don’t know what you will do until you do it.
You pick up the phone at work and it’s your wife’s best friend and she tells you to go someplace where no one else can hear you and you close the conference room door and she starts to speak (The FBI is on the way, The Shop is being raided) and your whole world changes.
Just like that.
It’s been five years. More than five years. Owen can’t recall—not with exact accuracy—what he said to Jules on that call, or how he got off the phone with her.
He just remembers the movement, which started immediately.
The only goal was to get out of there before the FBI arrived.
To get far away from there before anyone could attempt to ID him.
There was a yellow legal pad on his desk.
He picked it up and tossed it into his messenger bag and headed out of the office.
Early lunch? the receptionist asked. Owen nodded. He knows that he nodded. He knows that he hid his urgency the best that he could. His urgency, his fear. I’ll be back in a little while, he said. See you later…
Then he was out the front doors and racing through the parking lot and keying the lock to his car.
He got in and drove to the bank in Corte Madera, to the oldest bank in Corte Madera, which housed an underground vault with three bottom-row safe-deposit boxes under a numbered account.
He took a duffel bag and a messenger bag out of his trunk—the two bags he’d kept stored in his trunk precisely for this moment—and brought them inside the bank with him. Inside the vault.
Two safe-deposit boxes held the money. He filled up the duffel bag with all of it.
The third deposit box had a Canadian passport, two drivers’ licenses, an iPhone with an encrypted phone app already downloaded and connected, and a key to a storage unit in Vancouver. These he put into his messenger bag.
Before he walked out, on the floor of that vault, he wrote his daughter a note and put it in the duffel bag.
Then, he wrote his wife a note and put it in his back pocket.
He didn’t go to the docks. There was no time to go to the docks.
And even if there were, he wouldn’t go. If he saw Hannah, he wouldn’t have been able to leave without telling her everything.
He couldn’t tell her everything, not if he wanted to keep her safe.
He couldn’t tell her anything. He needed to be in Vancouver by the next day.
He drove through the night. He drove for thirteen hours straight, stopping only twice.
Fifteen minutes per stop—once at a rest stop in Astoria, Oregon, the second time at Lumen Field in Seattle, where he left his car at the rear of the eight-story parking structure.
He walked from Lumen Field to the nearby Greyhound bus station, where he hopped a bus to take him the rest of the way over the border into Canada.
But first he went to his daughter’s school and put the duffel bag in her locker, and found a girl leaving soccer practice, and handed her the note for Hannah. First, he said a prayer that they wouldn’t hate him for this. Not his daughter, not his wife.
But it was the wrong prayer. The right prayer was closer to the second one he made as he crossed the border into Canada: He prayed they’d understand.
They’d understand that he did have an escape hatch ready—for years he had it ready—one that included them.
But he’d planned it when Bailey was still a child, before his daughter became so specifically herself that to ask her to run felt more selfish than safe. It was before Owen understood what it would do to his wife, how it would blow an impossible hole through the center of her life.
And it was certainly before he picked up his phone and Jules told him he was out of time, and he knew (somewhere inside hadn’t he always known, even if he didn’t want to know?) that the only thing for him to do was to get as far away from both of them as quickly as he could.
No warnings, no explanations. Just away.
What can he say about that now? What can he say about any of this? Anything bad anyone wants to think about what he did, he gets it.
Anything bad anyone wants to think about him, he already thinks it about himself.
Owen lands in Austin a little before midnight.
When he steps off the jetway, it’s hot and muggy, the Texas air thick even this late at night.
He takes off his leather jacket, slings it over his backpack.
Then he heads toward ground transportation and the parking lot that houses the rental cars, his reservation paid for in advance, his membership to the rental car’s gold club helping him avoid talking with anyone in person. Hopefully.
It’s not easy renting a car with a New Zealand driver’s license. It sets off alarms. He’s prepared for this. He has prepared for all of this.
The computer sends him to spot 85, where a small SUV is waiting. He gets in, turns the key that is already in the ignition, and heads out of the airport parking lot and onto the familiar highway toward downtown.
Five years, ten months, and twenty-four days ago, time stopped.
He hadn’t called Bailey, even when he made it to Vancouver. Even though it nearly killed him not to.
He’d forced himself to put sixty-eight hours and eight thousand miles between them before he dared to call his daughter—even on an encrypted app—to even put into the world that amount of risk.
When Bailey picked up, Owen had told her that he didn’t have much time to explain. And she told him she knew about her mother, Kate. She knew about her mother and (more urgently) she knew about Kate’s father, Nicholas. Bailey’s grandfather, Nicholas.
Does she even remember telling Owen that? She was so upset, her tears coming through the phone, so he doesn’t know. But he’ll never forget.
Five years, ten months, and twenty-one days ago, Owen stood on a street corner in Wellington, New Zealand, and, from the other side of the world, he heard his daughter’s tears and he heard her say the name Nicholas Bell. And a new kind of clock started.
This was the moment he started to plan.
Through the car windows, downtown Austin comes into view.
South Congress Avenue is busy, even after midnight—a concert letting out at the Moody Theater, people waiting for their rideshares in front of the Paramount, the patio at Lamberts still overflowing with late-night barbecue.
Owen takes a left and drives up to the condominium on Second Street—the renovated firehouse, now coveted loft apartments.
He finds a parking spot and approaches the front doors. He doesn’t recognize the doorman standing there. He is new. Or, at least, newer than fifteen years.
“How can I help you?” the doorman asks him.
“Eight D.”
The doorman tilts his head, takes Owen in. “Pretty late for a visitor,” he says. “Is he expecting you?”
Owen hikes his backpack higher on his shoulder. He doesn’t answer.
“Who should I say is here?”
“Tell him it’s his son-in-law.”