I was anxious to get to California too—and less-than-anxious to work side by side with the increasingly demanding client. So I turned down the job. I clocked his strange behavior though. It was out of character for Owen to react that way—needy, controlling. When I raised it with him, he apologized for reacting badly. He said the move was just making him nervous. He was nervous about how Bailey would adjust to having me in her home. It always came down to Bailey for Owen. Any changes that upended her were going to upend him. I understood the anxiety. I let it go.

But I think about the other Austin red flag. When I asked him to come with me to Austin for my woodturners symposium, he went dark for a minute. He didn’t balk at the suggestion, but he pivoted. He did pivot. So maybe it wasn’t just about Bailey. Maybe it had something to do with Austin itself. Something he didn’t want me to run into there. Something he had run from.

I reach for my phone and call Jake, a diehard football fan: college, the NFL, classic games on YouTube at eight in the morning.

“It’s late where I am,” he says, instead of hello.

“What can you tell me about the Austin football stadium?” I say.

“I can tell you it’s not called that,” he says.

“Do you know anything about their football team?”

“The Longhorns? What do you want to know?”

“Their colors?”

“Why?”

I wait.

He sighs. “Orange and white,” he says.

“You positive?”

“Yes, burnt orange and white. Uniforms, mascot. Goalposts. The end zone. The entire stadium. It’s midnight. It’s after midnight. I’m sleeping. Why are you asking?”

I can’t seem to tell him the truth, which sounds crazy. The U.S. marshal who showed up at our house is based out of there. Bailey remembers being there. Maybe. And Owen got weird about the idea of us going there, two different times. Two different times I can now recall.

I don’t want to tell him that Austin is all I have.

I think of my grandfather. If he were alive, and sitting here with me, I could tell him. He wouldn’t think I was crazy. He’d just sit there and help me go through it all until I figured out what I needed to do. That’s why he was good at his job—at helping me understand what my job was. The first lesson he ever taught me was that it wasn’t just about shaping a block of wood into what you wanted it to be. That it was also a peeling back, to seeing what was inside the wood, what the wood had been before. It was the first step to creating something beautiful. The first step to making something out of nothing.