“Can we talk about something else?” she says. Then she puts her hand up. “You know what? I take that back. Can we talk about nothing? What I want is to talk about nothing at all.”

“Bailey…” I say.

“No,” she says. “Can you just leave me alone?”

Then she leans back, waiting for her pizza and for me to go away, in whichever order she can make those things happen.

What Don’t You Want to Remember?

I go inside, honoring Bailey and her request to be left alone. I have no desire to push her. I have no desire to demand she come inside. She is confused and angry, wondering if her father is who she thinks he is—wondering if she can still trust in the person she has always known him to be. Stable, generous, hers. She is angry that she has to question that—angry at him, angry at herself. It is a feeling I can relate to.

Protect her.

But from what? From what Owen was involved in at The Shop? From what he let happen there? Or does Owen want Bailey protected from something else? Something I can’t see yet? Something I don’t want to see yet?

I pace back and forth in my bedroom. I don’t want to antagonize Bailey, but I feel an urgent need to pull at any thread I can find. It’s all I can think to do—to reconsider (to ask her to consider) our foggy, gentle memories of Owen. To juxtapose them against these last twenty-four hours. Where do they meet?

Suddenly, one way they meet comes firing back. Austin. Something else I know about Austin and Owen. Shortly before I moved to Sausalito, I was offered a job there. A movie star who lived there was redoing her house, a ranch house on Westlake Drive, hugging Lake Austin.

She wanted help getting rid of her ex-husband’s aura. Her ex-husband had loved everything modern and hated anything rustic. Her interior designer had suggested my woodturning pieces. But she wanted to be involved, which meant I needed to go to Austin for two weeks and go through the process with her.

I asked Owen to come with me, and he shut the idea down. He was upset that I’d want to go anywhere that would delay my move to Sausalito—that would delay us beginning our lives together in the real way that we had been planning for.