We are on the ground for forty-two minutes.
Forty-two minutes, exactly. I hold the phone the entire time. I keep my eyes glued to the window. I watch the fuel truck. The men on the ground. I watch anyone getting too near to the airplane door.
I have mapped out a plan just in case they do. I have a plan to distract whoever comes in the front door while I get Bailey to safety. If they come up the stairs, I’ll move Bailey to the cockpit. I’ll lock her in there. I’ll lock myself out.
I’ll convince them to do it. I’ll convince them to take me. I’ll hand over the flash drive. I’ll hand them anything and everything for them to leave her alone. I’ll do what it takes to keep her free.
“They’re just about finished,” Daniel says.
I look up to see that he has come out of the cockpit. I give him a nod and turn back out to the fuel truck. The fuel truck that is getting ready to pull away. No one jumping off. No one, at all, making a move toward the plane door.
I turn back to Bailey, it starting to creep in, something like relief. But the only kind of relief I know now—the only kind I’ve known since Owen first disappeared. Temporary relief. Tightrope relief: the kind that must be navigated carefully until the next thing threatens to derail you. Threatens to cost you your balance.
“We’re safe,” she says.
It’s a question as much as she wants it to be a statement.
But I nod, wanting her to believe that’s true. And I don’t volunteer the rest of it—the part that she doesn’t need to hear. That, at the moment, I’m more certain than before that we are not safe.
Even if we’re going to get out of Miami in one piece, it’s still coming for us.
I know that it’s coming for us.
Something that I won’t be able to stop.
I don’t sleep the rest of the way to Paris.
I open my laptop again and study the news. A few smaller outlets are still focusing on Nicholas, but there is nothing on Owen.
I flip over to the flash drive, culling through the photographs in each album, going back toHannah’s Work.
There are several photos of my larger pieces, but the only photograph with any people in it is the selfie of the two of us at that early exhibition.
It took place at a gallery in Los Alamos—a small town not too far from Santa Barbara. I loved Los Alamos, in part because it had reminded me of where I grew up in Tennessee—rustic and serene, farmland as far as the eye could see.
After the exhibition that night, Owen joked that we could move there after Bailey graduated.If that’s what you want, I’ll follow you there, he’d said.Really, I’ll follow you anywhere.
I zoom back out, the memory cutting too hard.
But it sparks something in me, and I shift over to the album of France again, culling the entireO & H Honeymoonalbum. I’m not only looking for clues, but I’m also looking for the opposite.
What isn’t adding up in what Owen sent me? What doesn’t belong in this album, the way that the photograph of Daniel didn’t add upin the Sausalito folder? The way that including that exhibition in Los Alamos sticks out in the work folder?
Because maybe that’s what I should be following. What does Owen need me to know about what sticks out?
TheUlysses and sirenspainting.
Picasso’s famous painting of theOdyssey. I come back to that. Because I’m more and more certain that we didn’t see that in person—not together. Not on that trip.
I do a quick search for the painting, and sure enough we wouldn’t have seen it, not in Paris. The painting’s not in Paris.
It’s located at Musée Picasso Antibes—in the South of France. Why would Owen include a photograph of that, for me to find here?
“Did you get some rest?”
I look up, startled, to find Daniel standing over me. I flip my laptop closed and take a breath, doing a quick scan of the cabin. Sally is nowhere to be seen—not in the cabin or the galley. Sally is apparently in the restroom, Daniel taking the opportunity to come out of the cockpit to talk to me.
“A little.”
