He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter how many times I say the same thing. Avett doesn’t want to hear it,” he said. “What we need to make this all work.”

“My grandfather used to say that most people don’t want to hear the thing that will make it work better,” I said. “They want to hear what will make it easier.”

“And what did he say to do about that?”

“Find other people. You know, for starters.”

He tilted his head, took me in. “How do you always know what to say to me?” he said.

“Well, it’s really my grandfather saying it, but sure…” I said.

He reached for my hand, a smile spreading across his face. Like nothing happened, or at least like it wasn’t as important as he’d thought it was.

“Enough about this,” he said. “Let’s go see my chair.”

He started pulling me to the door, toward the backyard and the deck where the chair was drying—sanded, newly polished.

“You know you can’t have that chair,” I said. “Someone commissioned it. She is paying us a lot of money for it.”

“Good luck to her,” he said. “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”

I smiled. “What do you know about the law?”

“Enough to know if I’m sitting in that chair,” he said, “no one else is going to take it.”

Delete All History

At 10 A.M., the hotel café is already busy, the lights dimmed.

I sit at the bar, drinking an orange juice while most of the people around me are starting in on morning cocktails—mimosas and Bloody Marys, champagne, White Russians.

I stare at the row of televisions, all tuned to different news shows. They come at me in closed captions, most of them reporting on The Shop. PBS shows footage of Avett Thompson being handcuffed and escorted away. MSNBC has a preview of Belle’s Today show interview, Belle calling Avett’s arrest a travesty of justice. CNN’s chyron keeps warning that more indictments are coming, on repeat. It’s almost like a promise, mirroring Grady’s promise, that Owen will be in even more trouble soon. That whatever he is running from is about to catch him.

This is what gnaws at me, over and over, when I think of my husband—that something is coming for him, for all of us, that he couldn’t stop. That he has left me to try and stop it for him.

I take out my notepad and go back over what Grady said during our phone call—trying to recall every detail, trying to hone in on what may be important to glean from it. I keep coming back to how he said that Owen might have erased his own online history. And, as wrong as that feels, I try to move myself there, to that assumption, to see what it shows me.