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Summary: Chapters 19–22
Chapter 19: Sorry, We’re Open
Jake’s revelation that Owen has been using a false identity bothers Hannah, who feels certain that she knows her husband even if the facts she has been given about his life are fictions. That this news will destabilize an already reeling Bailey makes Hannah dread the morning. But, when Bailey wakes in the middle of the night, Hannah does not pause, asking her stepdaughter if she ever visited her father’s childhood home. Bailey says no, as Owen’s parents died before her birth. They get dressed to find some food and, while they eat, Hannah gently explains that Owen had previously used another name. Even though Hannah stresses her personal conviction that Owen had done so to protect Bailey, the young woman feels enraged and betrayed by her father.
Hannah longs to console Bailey but recognizes that honesty is the only path forward, even as Bailey becomes increasingly distraught when she realizes that both her name and birthday are surely fake. Hannah tries to reassure her that these are unimportant aspect of her identity but, no matter what she says, Bailey feels increasingly frustrated that she cannot remember more about her life before arriving in Sausalito. She realizes, though, that she had surely been wrong when she dismissed her boyfriend’s insistence that her father had not attended Princeton. This too, she bitterly acknowledges, was one of Owen’s lies, not Bobby’s error.
Chapter 20: Two Can Play at That Game
In the morning, Hannah calls Grady and lies, claiming Owen contacted her. Grady is not fooled, however, so she changes tactics, asking directly why there is no record of Owen prior to 2009. According to Grady, this absence can be explained by The Shop’s work in privacy, an answer that does not satisfy Hannah. Even though their mutual distrust generates a testy conversation, Hannah believes the Marshall is trying to protect Owen. Abruptly, she tells him about the hidden bag of money on the houseboat. From the way she talks, Grady realizes she is not in Sausalito, but Hannah hangs up rather than telling him they have come to Austin.
Chapter 21: One Year Ago
Hannah recalls an instance when Owen drops by her workshop unannounced in the middle of day. He sits, fascinated by the work she has done on a chair. When his phone buzzes, Owen disregards the call, which is from his boss Avett. He is evasive about what he breezily calls trouble at work. Hannah offers some advice from her grandfather about how to manage difficulties, but Owen changes the subject, jokily threatening to steal the chair she’s making.
Chapter 22: Delete All History
In the hotel café, Hannah goes back over her call with Grady while news about The Shop plays on television. As she tries to remember further details about Owen’s past, she remembers the stranger who said he recognized Owen as a high school classmate and searches the internet for Roosevelt Highs. Next, she texts Jules about the piggy back. Finally, Hannah recalls an anecdote Owen told often, about a professor who inspired his love for engineering and technology by telling him that he was the very worst student of the professor’s career. Excited at remembering this, Hannah and Bailey figure out that the professor’s name is Tobias Cookman and that he teaches at the University of Texas at Austin.
Analysis
Hannah and Bailey are strangers in a strange town, and they increasingly feel like strangers in their own lives as well. Owen’s lies are no longer limited to his past. Instead, they encompass everything about him and his daughter, and they even shape his relationship with his wife. What is revealed across these chapters significantly complicates Hannah’s insistence that Owen is a good person. People often accept minor falsehoods in relationships, sacrificing some honesty for harmony. But lying about one’s entire identity is a grave violation of trust, and here it makes Hannah and Bailey victims of his falsehoods. The stakes of Hannah’s investigation go up dramatically, as does her motivation to acquit Owen, even as it becomes harder for everyone—characters and readers—to imagine what Owen’s motives might have been.
Owen’s lies about who he is undermine Hannah’s sense of herself, too, striking a bitter blow to her perceptions of their marriage. She struggles to reconcile her faith in her husband as a good man and her marriage as a happy relationship with this news. If she has fallen in love with a liar, she wonders if she can trust her instincts again, instincts on which she prides herself. To avoid thinking of herself as gullible or foolish, she must fiercely believe in Owen, a belief that hinges on an active choice. Though she is aware that in reality she could be wrong about him, she decides to believe in him and, by extension, herself as well.
In this section, mistrust of law enforcement figures informs much of Hannah’s dynamic with Grady. Hannah takes his earlier advice to Hannah, to be wary of talking to law enforcement and to get a lawyer for protection, and applies it to him. There is nothing in his role as an officer of the law that would make him inherently trustworthy, either in the context of detective narratives or for twenty-first-century readers. But, while Grady may be an adversary, he is not a villain, for Hannah tells him about the money. Hannah may not trust Grady, but she recognizes limited ways in which she can work with him. Her realization that Grady is complicated, operating both as friend and foe, is a key one to the final unfolding of her investigation. It better prepares her for her eventual confrontation with the novel’s real antagonist in the last chapters of the book.
These chapters introduce the importance of difficulty for character growth. Hannah realizes that the connection she longs for with Bailey can only come through hard times. She recalls her strong relationship with her own grandfather developing due to shared pain, as well as his advice that people often prefer the easiest, rather than the most effective, solution to a problem. Hannah’s mistake in her approach to both Bailey and the search for Owen’s history has been her unwillingness to embrace difficulty. Hannah’s determination to review Owen’s stories and accept that they are lies with a potential grain of truth is a distinct change from her earlier approach of using Bailey’s memories to confirm stories about Owen. Her realization about difficulties being a positive also seems to trigger her question to Jules about the piggy bank and inspire her to reveal the bag of money to Grady. The piggy bank especially represents a crucial clue. Hannah’s determination to accept the inevitability of difficulty in relationships also foreshadows the hard decision she makes at the end to sacrifice her much-wanted relationship with Owen to secure Bailey’s future.
