Chapter 29 The Middle Road to Èze Goes One Way
The Middle Road to èze Goes One Way
Here’s what I know.
When Bailey was sixteen, we lost her father and I started taking notes in a sketchbook. Kind of a teenage version of a baby book. A record of her life.
At first, I was just keeping tabs on her big moments: her high school graduation, that first winter break home from college when we said goodbye to the floating home, the first vacation we took with Charlie and Nicholas.
Her dorm room move-ins and move-outs. That first night in her Abbot Kinney apartment.
I told myself that the sketchbook was for Bailey—to give to her one day. But somewhere in my mind I think I knew that it was for Owen, it was always for Owen too, if he ever found his way home again.
The sketchbook that was meant to live between the two bookends—the day Owen left, the day he came back.
As if it gets to be that simple. Nothing is simple when, at sixteen, Bailey lost her father.
And, at twenty-two, it’s possible she may have him again.
Possible, not certain. Far from certain.
If I’ve learned anything over these last five years, it’s that nothing gets to feel certain.
And it feels like it could jinx her—could jinx all of us—to believe the opposite.
“She’s strong,” Nicholas says. “That’s because of you.”
“I don’t know about that,” I say.
We are back on the motorway, heading toward èze. Nicholas is driving, his eyes on the road. I turn and look at him, take in his profile, trying to pull myself out of it: where Bailey is, what is about to transpire for her.
“I think that you’re giving me too much credit,” I say. “She came out that way.”
“People come out all sorts of ways,” Nicholas says. “Staying that way… that’s where the testament is.”
“Well, that’s a testament to her father then,” I say. “He was there with her long before I was.”
Nicholas nods, taking that in, a color passing over his face. It’s a strange mix of melancholy and sadness and something else I don’t understand entirely hiding in his eyes—something like guilt.
“How did he seem?” I ask.
“Owen?”
I nod. “I haven’t even asked you…” I say. “When you were with him, when you were together, how did he seem?”
“What’s the answer you’re looking for?” he asks.
“What’s the truth?”
He pauses, as if considering it—what the answer is. Maybe because the truth is complicated. I could sense that, even from the brief moment Owen was in front of me again at the Design Center, not quite like himself anymore. Though what did that even mean? Wasn’t he not like himself when I knew him?
“He seems like he needs you,” Nicholas says.
I flinch against that, the gravity of Nicholas’s words. And I turn away from him, turning away from a conversation that we can’t really have yet, not with what appears just beyond the dashboard.
A sign for èze on the roadside in front of us, 2 KILOMETERS, like a reminder that we are getting close. As if I need that reminder.
“You see down there?”
Nicholas motions over the cliffside, in the direction of the beach far below. I follow his eyes toward the gorgeous cliffside, green and lush and cavernous. Homes dot the hillside—their old French architecture and Mediterranean roofs, windows looking out bright and wide over the Mediterranean Sea.
“I do…”
“Frank’s is one of the only houses closer to the water,” he says. “Can you see down that far?”
I roll down the window and lean out a bit, scanning the cliffside and the rocks far below.
And I can make it out down by the water’s edge.
There are train tracks, and what looks like a small station beside them, a few lone houses farther down the road, stunning and isolated.
And that beachfront—the bright blue water against the sand—completely untouched.
It’s so beautiful that I could forget what we are doing here. Almost.
“I can see what drew him here,” I say. “The serenity, the peace. A perfect antidote, I’d imagine, to how he was living.”
“Certainly a lot worse places to try to be a better person,” he says.
“Is that what he’s been doing here?”
“Maybe in part,” Nicholas says.
But his voice tightens as he says this, and I see it flash in his eyes before he can hide it. The anger there. The anger that, after all this time, Nicholas is forced to be here, relitigating the safety of the people that matter the most to him.
“You think that Frank has that kind of conscience?” I ask.
Nicholas doesn’t hesitate. “No,” he says. “I’m just hoping that I do.”