Which is when I understand, in a flash, what I’ve been doing wrong with her—what I’ve been doing wrong in how I’ve been trying to connect with her. I thought if I were nice enough, sweet enough, she’d understand she could count on me. But that’s not how you learn you can count on someone. You learn it in the moments when everyone’s too tired to be sweet, too tired to try hard. You learn it by what they do for you then.

And what I’m going to do for her now is what my grandfather did for me. I’ll do whatever it takes for her to feel that she is safe.

“So… it wasn’t just him, right?” she says. “If he did this, I’m not who he said I am either then, right? My name and everything… at some point he changed it.”

“Yes,” I say. “If Jake’s correct, then, yes, you used to go by something else as well.”

“And all the details are different too, right?” She pauses. “Like… my birthday?”

That stops me. The heartbreak in her voice when she asks that question.

“Like my birthday’s not really my birthday?” she says.

“No, probably not.”

She looks down. She looks away from me. “That seems like something a person should know about themselves,” she says.

I fight back tears, gripping the table, the small table in this happy Austin restaurant—paintings on the wall, bright colors, all of it completely antithetical to how I feel. I will myself to stop, blinking the tears back. A sixteen-year-old girl, who apparently has no one but me, needs me not to cry. She needs me to be there for her. So I pull myself together, giving her the space to fall apart. Letting her be the one to do that.

She folds her hands on the table, tears filling her eyes. And I feel nearly leveled by it, watching her in that kind of pain.

“Bailey, I know this feels impossible,” I say. “But you are you. Whatever details are around that, whatever your father didn’t tell you, that doesn’t change who you are. Not at your core.”

“But how can I have no memory of being called something else? Of where I lived? I should remember, shouldn’t I?”

“You just said it yourself, you were a kid. You were just coming into consciousness when you became Bailey Michaels. None of this is a reflection on you at all.”

“Just on him?” she says.

I think again about the guy at the Berkeley Flea Market, the guy who called Owen a prom king. Owen’s calm reaction to him. He was completely unfazed. Could he have faked that so well? And what did it say about him if he did?

“You don’t remember anyone ever calling your father anything else, do you? Before Sausalito?”

“Like a nickname?” she says.