“Two days ago, did you think he had it in him to make up his entire life history? Because he did do that.”

I stare at the ugly hotel hallway carpet with its patterns of fuchsia roses, trying to find in them something like solace.

This feels impossible. Every bit of this feels impossible. How do you begin to grapple with the idea that your husband is running from the person he used to be, a person whose real name you don’t even know? You want to argue that someone is getting the story wrong. Someone is getting your story wrong. In your story, the one you know by heart, none of this makes sense. Not where this story began, not where it’s going. And certainly not where it’s threatening to end.

“Jake, how do I go back inside and tell Bailey that nothing about her father is what she thinks? I don’t know how to tell her that.”

He gets uncharacteristically quiet. “Maybe tell her something else,” he says.

“Like what?”

“Like you have a plan to get her away from this,” he says. “At least until it’s all sorted out.”

“But I don’t.”

“But you could. You absolutely could get her away from this. Come to New York. Stay with me. Both of you, at least until this is all sorted out. I have friends on the board at Dalton. Bailey can finish out the school year there.”

I close my eyes. How am I here again? On the phone with Jake? How is Jake the one who is helping me? When we ended our relationship, Jake said I’d always felt absent to him. I didn’t argue with him—I couldn’t. Because I was a little absent. It had felt like something was missing with Jake. The very thing I’d thought I had with Owen. But if Jake is correct about Owen, then Owen and I didn’t have what I thought we did. Maybe we didn’t have anything close to it, at all.

“I appreciate the offer. And right now it doesn’t sound so bad.”

“But…” he says.

“From what you’re telling me, we got here because Owen ran away,” I say. “I can’t run away too, not until I get to the bottom of this.”

“Hannah, you really need to think of Bailey here.”

I open the hotel room door and peek in. Bailey is sound asleep on her bed. She is curled up in the fetal position, her purple hair sticking out like a disco ball on the pillows. I close the door, step back into the hall.

“That’s all I’m thinking of, Jake,” I say.

“Not yet it’s not,” he says. “Or you wouldn’t be trying to find the one person that in my opinion you should be keeping her away from.”

“Jake, he’s her father,” I say.

“Maybe someone should remind him,” he says.