Chapter 17
In New Zealand, He Learns Patience
During Owen’s first year in New Zealand, there was an unexpected cold snap.
In Marlborough, winemakers get used to cooler temperatures—they ready themselves for the grapes to take longer to ripen—but this was something else.
This cold snap came on fast and quick and didn’t dissipate.
The grapes not ripening, frost sticking to the vines. The worst harvest they’d had in years.
The harvest, Owen’s first, nearly ruined.
He didn’t leave Marlborough for that whole harvest. He spent his days in the vineyard helping to salvage what could be salvaged. He worked the vines until his skin blistered from the cold and his fingers were calloused and until he was too exhausted to think.
Then he stayed up all night thinking, the same questions working their way through his head: How was he going to get Hannah and Bailey out of the mess he was responsible for? How was he going to ensure they were safe?
These weren’t theoretical questions. These were the only questions.
It might seem random that he ended up in New Zealand—that maybe he was just trying to get as far away as he could. But it wasn’t random.
Owen and his mother had lived in Las Cruces, New Mexico, when Owen was a baby—back when his mother was still hoping his father would want to spend time with him—back when she thought that he would come to deserve being a father.
By the time he was two (by the time Owen remembered anything), his mother had given up and had relocated the two of them to Texas. Fredericksburg, Texas—the heart of Texas wine country, lush and historic, and eighty miles outside of Austin.
Shortly after they first moved there, Owen’s mother became friends with a local vintner named Tom.
From what Owen remembered about him, he was tall and wiry with a thick mustache.
And he was kind. That was the primary thing that Owen remembered.
Tom was always nice to Owen, and always so nice to his mother.
Which, even as a young boy, he knew was new to her in a way it shouldn’t have been.
Tom wasn’t a huge part of their daily life.
His mother didn’t have time for a man to be a huge part of anything.
Her primary focus was Owen. Owen always felt that focus in what his mother said, and in what she did.
In everything about how she lived her life.
She got a job as an assistant teacher at his local elementary school.
So her hours matched Owen’s. She supplemented her pay by waiting tables at a bar near UT-Austin on the weekend.
She’d leave Owen in the John M. Kuehne Physics Mathematics Astronomy (PMA) Library during her afternoon shifts.
She made friends with the research librarian, who kept an eye on Owen.
Owen would sit at a table quietly, drinking an apple juice and working on his math homework and the supplemental math workbooks his mother managed to afford for him.
He loved math. It wasn’t a punishment for him, spending his afternoons this way. It was a victory.
But even with both of his mother’s jobs, they couldn’t afford a lot of extras. Certainly, his mother didn’t seem to treat herself to a lot.
Maybe this is why it was notable to Owen—and probably why he remembered—that his mother would get a case of wine after every harvest from a small-batch biodynamic vineyard in Marlborough.
Billow Lake Private Select Wines. A beautiful old barn on the label, a vineyard laid out behind it. A single bottle of their highly rated pinot noir retailing for upward of 280 NZD.
Owen never asked his mother how they could afford such nice wine.
He didn’t want her to misunderstand and feel guilty—especially not when he was glad that she was treating herself to anything.
But she volunteered it at some point. She volunteered that the wine was a present from the label’s winemaker: Do you remember my friend who used to live nearby?
He moved to New Zealand. Do you remember my friend Tom?
The way she said friend was like something he never heard coming out of his mother’s mouth, like a prayer.
More than three decades later, Owen opened the door to Billow Lake Wines’ tasting room.
It was in that old barn. The barn had since been renovated—and was large and clean. There was a long bar for the tastings, a series of two-tops scattered throughout. There was a young guy wiping down the bar top in a flannel shirt and jeans.
He looked up and smiled in Owen’s direction.
“I’m sorry, bro…” he said, his accent thick and warm and friendly. “Tastings are done for the day.”
That was when Tom walked out from the backroom, carrying a box of wine. He saw Owen standing there, and he did a double take. That double take alone brought a strange comfort to Owen—the only real comfort to Owen that he’d had since leaving Bailey. Since leaving Hannah.
“Hey, there,” Tom said to him.
Owen nodded in his direction. “Hello.”
The bartender looked back and forth between them, confused, Tom quickly motioned in Owen’s direction, figuring out a way to turn whatever weirdness the bartender might have felt in the room, moving around in the air.
“Go ahead and introduce yourself to Simon…” he said to Owen. “We’re not formal around here.”
Owen thought of the name on his passport. It was an Irish passport. Lucas Timothy McQuade.
“I’m Lucas,” he said. “But I go by Luke.”
“Luke’s going to be taking on Buckland’s old position,” Tom told Simon. “Set him up at the staff quarters. I’ll finish up here.”
“Fine, then,” Simon said. “I’ll just grab my stuff.”
When Simon disappeared into the back room, Tom turned back to Owen.
“After you freshen up, come back here and find me. I’ll take you to the vineyard, show you around.”
Owen nodded. “Will do.”
Then Tom looked at him one more time, up and down. His eyes blinking in double speed, his voice cracking as he started to speak.
“You look just like her, you know.”
“I’ve been told.”
This was as close as either of them came to acknowledging who Owen was. Tom took the cue from Owen introducing himself as Luke. Tom clocked what was happening in his own body, the pain he was feeling, just knowing how much trouble Owen must have been in, to need to show up there.
“I was real sorry to hear she passed,” Tom said. “I’m still sorry.”
It caught Owen in the chest, shutting his breath down for a moment. It didn’t matter that it had been a lifetime ago—two lifetimes ago, really—since his mother had gotten sick. Since she’d been gone from him.
He had just turned eighteen, just gotten to college, hadn’t even met Kate yet. But the loss of his mother could still rock him—rock the ground under him—in a way he knew he’d never completely recover from. In a way he only started to recover from the moment he laid eyes on Bailey.
He could see that Tom held that grief too. His eyes glazing over for a moment—but for just a moment—before he turned away. Before he started putting the wine bottles down on the countertop, getting back to work.
A silent agreement was made in that moment. A silent agreement was made to never speak of it beyond this conversation.
That was the only time, in five years, that they let the truth sit there between them.
Not just his mother, but who Owen really was—and what it meant to him that, on the other side of the world, running for his life, there was someone who knew the thread of it.
The person that Owen was trying to reclaim.
It stopped Owen from being completely anonymous.
And Owen suspected that it was its own kind of danger, being anonymous. You need someone to know you, so you don’t disappear.
So you can remember too, as if Owen needed the reminder. His one job now. His only job.
Get back to them.
In the mornings, Owen would be in the vineyard by 5 a.m.
He tried not to think during the day. He tried not to let himself think about Hannah and Bailey.
The work helped. His hands and body busy for ten hours straight, often longer.
Tom ran a biodynamic vineyard, which meant there were certain rules to the harvesting.
There were certain rules to every aspect of farming—to taking care of the vineyard and the farm and the entirety of Tom’s land. The rules were comforting, connective.
The more Owen learned, the more Tom allowed him to do. He helped maintain the vines and the soil and the tea gardens. He worked the compost pile and the beehive and the chicken coop.
At night, bone-tired, he’d get into the small twin bed in the staff room. Eventually, but never for long, he would sleep.
Once a week he walked to one of five nearby towns and spent the afternoon at either a coffee shop or the local library.
He spent the afternoon somewhere with internet access.
He knew that the organization was not tracing every worldwide search associated with Hannah Hall or Bailey Michaels or Nicholas Bell.
But he operated as though they were. He used a public computer and a shrouded IP address and avoided certain key words.
And once a month, on these trips, he would let himself check on them. He wouldn’t search for them directly—not in those early days, at least—but, rather, search for things related to them.
As an example: He would scan Bailey’s high school’s public social pages. He’d scour the public page just to catch a glimpse of Bailey in one of the school musicals. A video of her singing. Sometimes both.
It was a long time before he let himself go to Hannah’s website, her Instagram feed.
But he would let himself look up Jules’s new photo essays in the San Francisco Chronicle—knowing Hannah would always leave a supportive comment.
Her name there, among the others, a calming reminder that she was okay. She was, for the moment, safe.
At night, nearly every night, he would plan. No matter how tired he was, sleep never lasted for long.
The pain would rise up so fast, cutting him, a fierce pinch hitting behind the ribs.
Visceral and immediate. Every fucking time.
One memory, in particular, was wedged into his subconscious, apparently.
It was wedged in the space between what Owen would allow himself to consciously hold on to about Hannah and what he, apparently, had no choice but to hold on to about her.
That very first moment. In her studio in New York. That very first moment they locked eyes, like a prelude to all the rest of it.
He was bent down by Hannah’s desk—a large farm table—Hannah a few feet from him. It was easy to say that she was beautiful (which she was), effortlessly beautiful in a tank top and paint-splattered jeans. It was easy to admit he was in awe of her, especially surrounded by her work.
But it wasn’t any of that. Or, at least, it wasn’t as simple as that.
It was something that was stitched into him—in a way that nothing before had ever stitched into him.
It was what happened to him that very first moment—when Hannah turned toward him.
The first moment with his wife, and the last with her. Of course, you never know when you’re having your last moment with the person you love. Owen certainly didn’t know. Hannah was just walking him out to his car. She didn’t do that every morning, but she did it the last morning.
They walked down the docks together and said goodbye by his car in the parking lot. She kissed him goodbye, slow and lingering. I love you, she said, like any other morning. See you tonight.
Because, of course, she counted on the fact that she would.
It felt like another injury. It was also further proof of what he had lost, what he had allowed himself to lose. A fitting punishment for what he’d had no right to reach for in the first place.
Now, it would wake him at night, like a jolt. That last moment with her, juxtaposed up against the first, playing back on an unforgiving loop.
It was just as well. He’d turn on the dingy light by his twin bed and put on a pot of coffee. He’d get back to work.
He was mapping the organization in detail. The entire family. He made charts on Frank. Detailed charts. He made charts on all six of Frank’s children, knowing that they were the key to it—what Owen would need to do next.
At first, and for a long time, he tried to figure out how to do this on his own. Every mapped-out plan, every possible escape route.
There had to be a way to do it on his own, he thought. But there was always the moment that he realized he needed him to pull it off.
Isn’t this how it worked? How you start is so often where you need to return. That was certainly the case here.
There was only one road. One road to help Hannah and Bailey. One road to keep them safe.
And it always led him back to Nicholas.