The Last Thing He Told Me

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021

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Chapters 28-30Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2

Chapter 28 Summary: “Careful What You Wish For”

As Hannah and Bailey flee The Never Dry, they run into a human traffic jam on an Austin bridge where people gather every evening to watch hundreds of bats fly into the night sky. They maneuver around the crowd and continue running towards the hotel, but suddenly Bailey stops and tells Hannah she remembers Charlie Smith and being called “Kristin.” Bailey asks Hannah if Hannah thinks Kate is her mother and Hannah says she does.

Back at the hotel, the two women step into the elevator but when they are joined by a strange man, Hannah forces Bailey off the elevator and into the stairway.

Chapter 29 Summary: “Eighteen Months Ago”

In this flashback chapter, Hannah and Owen traveled from New York to California as Hannah relocated to marry Owen. On the plane, Hannah asked Owen about Olivia, his first wife. Owen told Hannah a story about when he and Olivia took Bailey to Los Angeles when she was a baby. That weekend, a tiger escaped the zoo, and showed up in a family’s backyard. The family had been at the zoo a few weeks prior and one of their young sons had been obsessed with the tiger, crying and asking why he could not take the tiger home. Was it a coincidence that the tiger ended up at that boy’s house? Olivia, Owen told Hannah, was obsessed with the story and felt that it was not a coincidence. He explained, ”Olivia thought it served as proof. That sometimes you find your way to the place that wants you most” (214).

Owen told Hannah she would have loved Olivia, and Hannah asks for reassurance that they are doing the right thing because she is unfamiliar with what it takes to be a family. Owen suggested Hannah try to trust him, to which Hannah replied that she did. Owen asked, “Metaphorically or actually?” and Hannah responded, “Here’s hoping they’re the same thing [...] ” (216).

Chapter 30 Summary: “The Good Lawyer”

Shaken by the encounter with Charlie at The Never Dry, Hannah begins packing to leave Austin and tells Bailey to do the same. In the middle of packing, though, Hannah sends Jake a text, asking him to research Katherine Smith. She then remembers a photo she saw at the bar, of Katherine and Charlie Smith with their parents Meredith Smith and Nicholas Bell.

A quick internet search reveals Nicholas Bell’s history: As a young lawyer, he took on several difficult defense cases, earning the nickname “The Good Lawyer.” Bell defended a young man who was a drug pusher on the UT campus, and got him off on a technicality. When the drug trafficker’s bosses—members of a crime syndicate—heard about this, they wanted Bell to do the same for other operatives in the syndicate. They wined and dined Bell to convince him to take the job and Bell spent nearly 30 years working for the syndicate. One day, Bell’s daughter Kate was walking home from her job at the Texas Supreme Court when she was killed in a hit-and-run accident. It was a clear Friday afternoon, and coincidentally, the very time Bell routinely spent with his granddaughter one block away from the accident scene.

Despite the syndicate’s denial that they killed Bell’s daughter as retaliation for the case he just lost, Bell’s son-in-law believed the syndicate was to blame. In his fury, he agreed to turn state’s evidence against his father-in-law and the syndicate, which sent Nicholas Bell to prison for six years, along with 18 members of the crime syndicate. The son-in-law and his small daughter disappeared after the trial. The son-in-law’s name was Ethan Young and his daughter’s name was Kristin.

As Hannah finishes reading, she smashes her phone, rendering it inoperable, and emerges from the bathroom to tell Bailey they need to immediately leave Austin. Bailey is no longer in the hotel room. After a few minutes of frantic searching in the halls, Hannah returns to the hotel room. But when the door opens a few minutes later, it is not Bailey in the doorway—it’s US Marshal Grady Bradford.

Chapters 28-30 Analysis

The inclusion of the bats and spectators on the bridge in Chapter 28 is another instance where Dave has mixed a real-life event into a work of fiction, grounding the novel’s action in reality and reinvigorating the reader’s willingness to suspend disbelief and engage fully with the story.

When Hannah admits to Bailey she believes Kate is Bailey’s real mother, the reader is relieved to know that Hannah has come to the same conclusion the reader has. The reader’s relief is temporary, though, because Hannah’s reaction to the stranger in the elevator reminds the reader that both women, but particularly Bailey, are still in danger.

It is hard to know whether the story about the tiger in Chapter 29 was real or something Owen made up to deflect further questions about Olivia, but what is clear is that Hannah found it meaningful. It is a further contemplation on the idea of “home” and reminds the reader how important this concept is to Hannah—who never had a proper home as a child—foregrounding the decision Hannah will make about Bailey’s future.

Chapter 29 is an expository chapter providing answers to several of the questions that have been building over the course of the novel, followed by another cliffhanger: Bailey is gone, but Grady Bradford has arrived. Knowing what she now knows about the danger Bailey might be in after Charlie Smith recognized her, the stakes are incredibly high for Hannah, who must find Bailey and keep her safe. First, though, she will have to get past the US Marshal.

As in other chapters, Chapter 29 with an ominous cliffhanger when Hannah recalls telling Owen she hopes she can trust him both metaphorically and actually.