“No, more like… by another name completely?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know…” She pushes her coffee across the table. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

“I know.”

She starts twirling her hair in her hands, the purple getting mixed up with her dark nail polish, her eyes blinking wildly as she tries to think.

“I have no idea what anyone called him,” she says. “I never paid attention, why would I?”

She sits back, done guessing about her father, done guessing about her past, and completely exhausted from feeling like she has to. Who can blame her? Who wants to be sitting in a strange Austin restaurant trying to figure out who the most important person in your world was pretending to be? And how you missed it. Who he actually was.

“You know what? Let’s just go,” I say. “It’s late. Let’s go back to the hotel and try to get some sleep.”

I start to stand up, but Bailey stops me. “Wait…” she says.

I sit back down.

“Bobby said something to me a couple months ago,” she says. “He was applying to college and wanted to ask my father for an alumni recommendation for Princeton. But when he looked him up in the list of alums, he said he couldn’t find an Owen Michaels anywhere. Not as a graduate in the engineering school, not as a student in the regular college either. I said obviously he looked it up in the wrong place, and then he got into University of Chicago and just dropped it. I never even remembered to ask Dad, but I just assumed it was Bobby not knowing how to work the alumni database or whatever.” She pauses. “Maybe I should have asked him.”

“Bailey, why would you? Why would you assume he was lying to you?”

“Do you think he was ever going to tell me?” she says. “Did he plan to take me for a walk one day and let me in on who I really am? Honestly, was he going to tell me that basically everything I knew about my life was a lie?”

I look at her in the dim light. I think of my conversation with Owen, the conversation about taking a vacation to New Mexico. Was he actually thinking of letting me into some of this then? If I’d pushed a little harder, would he have?

“I don’t know,” I say.

I expect her to say how unfair that is. I expect her to get upset again. But she stays calm.

“What’s he so scared of?” she says.

It stops me. Because that’s it. That feels like the crux of all of this. Owen is running from something that he is terrified of. He has spent his life running from it. And, more important, he has spent his entire life trying to keep Bailey from it.