Jake’s words pound in my head. Owen Michaels doesn’t exist. Owen isn’t Owen. He’s deceived me about the most central details of his life. He deceived his daughter about the most central details of hers. How is that possible? It feels entirely impossible, considering the man I thought I knew. I do know him. I still believe this, despite the evidence to the contrary. And this belief in him (in us) will either show me to be a steadfast partner or a complete fool. Hopefully those don’t turn out to be the same thing.

After all, this is what I thought I knew. Twenty-eight months ago a man walked into my workshop in New York City wearing a sports jacket and Converse sneakers. On the way to the theater that night, he took me to dinner at a small tapas restaurant on Tenth Avenue, and he started to tell me the story of his life. It began in Newton, Massachusetts, and included four years at Newton High followed by four years at Princeton University, a move to Seattle, Washington, with his college sweetheart, and then a move to Sausalito, California, with his daughter. There were three jobs and two degrees and one wife before me, who he’d lost in a car accident. It was a car accident he could barely talk about more than a decade later, his face cloudy and dark. Then there was his daughter. The highlight of his story—the highlight of his life—his headstrong, inimitable daughter. He moved with her to a small town in Northern California because she’d pointed to it on a map. And said, let’s try there. And that was something he could give her.

This is what his daughter thought she knew. She’d spent the majority of her life in Sausalito, California, in a floating home with a father who never missed a soccer game or a school play. There were Sunday night dinners at restaurants of her choosing, and a weekly trip to the movies. There were lots of jaunts to San Francisco museums, plenty of neighborhood potlucks, and the annual barbecue. She didn’t remember their life before Sausalito, except in vague snapshots: a birthday party with a great magician; a trip to the circus where she cried at the clown; a wedding somewhere in Austin, Texas. Bailey filled in the blanks with what her father told her. Why wouldn’t she? That’s how you fill in the blanks—with stories and memories from the people who love you.