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—rockthe 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 theSan 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 himselfto 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.
