Chapter 6 Malibu Road Is Private for a Reason
Malibu Road Is Private for a Reason
On the highway, the taxi passes the exit for Entrada Drive and my workshop.
Despite my heart racing, despite the fact I know it’s not possible, I feel a pull to ask the driver to turn that way, to get to pretend (for a little longer) this is any other day.
To spend it at my workshop in Rustic Canyon, a beautiful slice of Los Angeles right off the Pacific Coast Highway—hilly and quiet and incredibly private.
My workshop is on a small road that dead-ends into a cul-de-sac.
It’s in a ranch-style house with hedges out front and a large side yard.
It has plenty of room for my lathe, my oversize bookshelves filled with wood blanks, and for the sizable storage shed that houses my larger pieces in various stages of production.
There are only a handful of other houses on the road, which is across the street from a Eucalyptus Garden, the backyard offering foggy views of the ocean and the mountains and Malibu out in the distance.
I open the window as we pass the exit, my workshop hidden by that beautiful canyon. But I stay quiet, and the driver keeps going, not taking the exit, heading past Topanga Canyon and toward Malibu. Toward Malibu, and toward my destination: a beachfront house on the end of Malibu Road.
It’s a house that belongs to one of my clients—a client who is now married to my former fiancé, Jake.
The client is an actress who I started working with shortly after I moved to Los Angeles, building furniture for nearly every room of her Malibu beach house.
She is bright and sarcastic and beautiful—and I had a feeling, as soon as I met her, that she and Jake might like each other.
I had such a strong feeling that, even though I wasn’t in the business of setting up my former fiancé, I felt compelled to introduce them.
And I’m so glad that I did. They fell in love and got married and are expecting their first child together.
Jake now the best version of Jake there seems to be.
They spend most of their time in New York City, but they kept this house on Malibu Road, Jake’s name not on the deed.
That part—not putting Jake on the deed—they did for me. For me and for Bailey. So no one would think to look for us there. At least not quickly.
I ask the taxi to let me off half a mile away from their house, at the Malibu Country Mart—a large outdoor shopping area dotted with fancy stores and bakeries and restaurants, a sign announcing that paparazzi aren’t welcome.
The surfers and the beautiful locals are all more interesting to look at than I am, which makes disappearing here feel possible.
I pay the driver in cash and slide into the local coffee shop in case he is watching where I go. In case he, or anyone, figures out that it was me who he dropped here.
The coffee shop is already bustling inside and on the back patio, Malibu locals taking in the early morning sun and heat from the comfort of their cappuccinos. Their oversize green juices.
I head out a different exit without ordering anything and jog toward the northern edge of the Country Mart—and the crosswalk that runs across the highway. Toward a small residential neighborhood on the other side, the beach and ocean just beyond it.
As soon as the light turns, I race across the highway and past Ralph’s supermarket and the animal hospital and the gas station. I jog through a parking lot that lets me out on the private (and quiet) of Malibu Road, Jake’s house in the distance.
The house is a stunner: all glass and beach views, my rustic wood furniture visible through the filmy windows, the large steel doors.
I don’t enter through the front doors though. I have a remote to the garage in my bag. Bailey has the other one. I let myself in, closing the garage quickly behind me.
I head into the house, passing through the small mudroom, and into the large great room—a living room and a home office and a kitchen all wrapped into one.
I turn on the lights in the kitchen and the television in the living room, finding CNN on the remote, as I pull a new burner phone out of my bag.
Then I tap in Grady’s cell phone number, as opposed to calling him at the US Marshals office, an extra layer of protection, even though Grady Bradford is the one US marshal Owen trusted.
The one who, over time, I’ve come to trust too.
There’s no trusting anyone completely, though—not at this moment.
Grady picks up on the first ring, like he’s been waiting. Because he has.
“Is Owen okay?” I ask.
“Where are you, Hannah?”
“You first, Grady.”
I’m turning up the volume on the television, moving through the house quickly and closing the electric blinds.
I’m focused on that, on closing the blinds, and on what I think Grady is going to say, when I get my answer—or I get part of my answer—coming from the television news reporter. Nicholas Bell, infamous criminal defense lawyer, has died.
I think I must have heard wrong, my back to the television screen.
But I turn quickly, and there it is, Nicholas’s face on the news. A slightly younger Nicholas dressed in a suit, standing outside court, microphones bouncing up against his face. The chyron parroting the news anchor, screaming the finality, the words in bold on the bottom of the screen.
NICHOLAS BELL, LAWYER FOR THE ORGANIZATION CRIME SYNDICATE, PRONOUNCED DEAD AT TEXAS HILL COUNTRY HOME
“Holy shit,” I say.
My breath leaves my chest, my eyes drilling into the screen.
“Nicholas is dead?”
“He is,” he says. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you that. He died in his sleep early this morning.”
My questions start to come out hot and quick. “How, Grady? What happened?”
“He was out at the lake. They think it was a heart attack. But I’m going to head out to the lake this afternoon, try to get the details in person.
It’s a real tiny office out there, obviously.
Just the coroner, not even an assistant, at least not one who I can reach.
Can’t get any real information on the phone. ”
I try to center myself, tears filling my eyes. A tightness pressing in hard on my ribs.
Nicholas is gone. Nicholas who, over these last five years, has evolved from someone that I feared to a person that I deeply trust. The person who I’ve come to trust most, at least when it comes to Bailey.
How can I begin to explain that evolution between us? Despite all the ways I initially bucked against it, it was impossible for me not to move toward Nicholas. It was impossible, on the simplest level, because of how Nicholas was—and the kindness he showed, over and over again, to Bailey.
It wasn’t just that Nicholas showed up for Bailey for the proud-grandparent highlight reel—for her prom pictures and graduation and her musical opening nights.
It was that Nicholas wanted (more than anything) to be there for the rest of it.
The good things and the hard things too.
Nicholas insisted on being there for everything.
When Bailey got a concussion on her senior high school class trip to the Arches in Moab, Nicholas got on a plane as fast as I did, walking into that small Utah hospital within minutes of me.
I remember the feel of his hand on my shoulder as I turned around to find him there, one of many reminders that I wasn’t in it alone.
When Bailey was doing the intensive summer training institute at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, her house was ransacked and robbed.
That time, Nicholas beat me to Massachusetts, providing a safe haven for Bailey and her roommates at a local hotel.
He offered me that same small squeeze of my shoulder when I walked into the hotel room, a silent acknowledgment that he intended to be someone I could count on.
Again and again, Nicholas proved that when it came to the person who mattered more to me than anything in the world, I had someone to help hold her.
Which is why, over time, he became my first phone call when anything went wrong with Bailey.
When things went right with her too. Nicholas earned that with his commitment to her.
He earned Bailey’s desire to spend holidays together and birthdays and college vacations.
And, in the process, he earned the same thing from me.
After all, the easiest path to loving someone is when you share the most important thing together.
Bailey was our most important thing. And Nicholas loved her in the same unmitigated, unapologetic way that I did.
He loved her in the way that only your family can.
Over time, it felt like he and I started to love each other that way too.
And now, like that, he’s gone.
The heat rises up, a seizing taking hold in my chest, in my lungs. The impossible and permanent truth.
I’m suddenly without him.
“This isn’t good, Hannah,” Grady says. “Everything has changed.”
“What does that mean?”
“The organization isn’t honoring the deal you two made. You and Nicholas. That you and Bailey would be safe.”
“Not honoring it how?”
“You need to let me bring you in,” he says.
“Answer the question first.”
“Their mandate has apparently shifted, now that Nicholas is gone. The organization wants Owen… however they need to get to him. You’re the only known line to him. You and Bailey…”
I hear the rest of it before Grady even says it, my heartbeat picking up.
Eighteen years haven’t thawed the organization’s anger toward Owen.
I know as much. I know all the time in the world won’t thaw what they view as Owen’s betrayal (of them, of Nicholas) for turning state’s evidence and testifying against them.
But Bailey and I are immune to that vendetta. Or we are supposed to be. Except now, apparently, the agreement Nicholas made with his former clients to keep Bailey and me safe isn’t being honored—now that Nicholas isn’t here to make sure his clients honor it.