I stay quiet for a moment. I stay quiet until I trust myself to speak. “Okay then,” I say.

“Okay then?” he says. “Okay then, what?”

“I’d like you to speak with your former employers about doing that,” I say.

He doesn’t even try to hide just how confused he is. He is confused because he thought he knew what I was doing here. He thought I was going to beg for Owen’s life, for his safety. He doesn’t understand that this is exactly what I’m doing, even if it doesn’t look like it.

“Do you understand what you’re considering here?” he says.

I’m considering an Owen-less life. That’s what. A life that isn’t anything like what I’d imagined for myself, but a life where Bailey gets to stay Bailey. She gets to stay the young woman she’s become under Owen’s watchful eye, the one he is so proud of. She’ll continue to live her life, heading to college in two years, heading to whatever life she wants, not as someone else—not as someone she has to pretend to be—but as herself.

Bailey and I will go on—but without Owen, without Ethan. Owen, Ethan: the two of them start melding themselves together in my mind—the husband I thought I knew, the husband I didn’t. The husband I don’t get to have. This is what I’m considering.

This is the deal I’m willing to make if Nicholas is. Which is when I tell him why.

“It’s what Ethan wants,” I say.

“To live his life without her?” he says. “I don’t believe that.”

I shrug. “It doesn’t make it any less true,” I say.

Nicholas closes his eyes. He looks tired suddenly. And I know it’s partially because he is thinking of himself—of the daughter (and granddaughter) he’s had to live his life without. But also because he is feeling sympathy for Owen, sympathy he doesn’t want to feel, but he is feeling it all the same.

And there it is, what Nicholas least expects to show me. His humanity.

So I decide to tell him the truth, to say out loud the one thing I’ve been thinking all week, but haven’t said out loud—not to anyone.

“I never really had a mother,” I say. “She left when I was little, not much older than when you last saw your granddaughter. And she hasn’t been involved in my life in any meaningful way. An occasional card or a phone call.”

“And why are you telling me this?” he says. “For my compassion?”

“No, I’m not doing it for that,” I say. “I had my grandfather, who was completely amazing. Inspiring. And loving. I had more than most people.”

“So why?”