Bailey takes the elevator back upstairs, heads into the back room again—Ulysses and sirenswaiting for her. But no one else. Her hand is in her bag, hovering over her burner phone—hovering over the send button, which will go directly to Seth, in case the young guy reappears. In case anyone does.
For now, she is safe. She can’t be certain, but she is certain enough.
She takes a seat on the bench in front of theUlyssespainting, where her father is supposed to meet her.
She feels the panic starting to rise. What if she missed him? What if something happens and he can’t come to her? What if the plan is altered, again, before he gets to her? But she closes her eyes against it.
Three breaths. She takes three breaths in and out, just like Hannah taught her. Hannah’s voice running through her mind, her heart.
Then she does the hardest thing she knows how to do.
She sits there and she waits.
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, 2KILOMETERS, like a reminder that we are getting close. As if I need that reminder.
