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 downnext 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. Justaway.
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.
