The Last Thing He Told Me

“Sausalito is on the other side of the Golden Gate from San Francisco, but a world away from city life. Quiet, charming. Sleepy.” 

Sausalito is the crucible in which Hannah finds herself dealing with Owen’s disappearance. While the town is appealing on many levels, it is also a place that doesn’t easily accept outsiders—which Hannah knows from personal experience—nor does it allow someone to remain anonymous the way a large city like New York or Los Angeles does. When the news about Owen’s company breaks, the “walls” of Sausalito start closing, and Hannah feels watched and judged by her neighbors.

“But, when I look back now, I think my mother did me a favor exiting the way she did—without apology, without vacillation. At least she made it clear: There was nothing I could have done to make her want to stay.”

This is Hannah’s view of her childhood and her mother’s abandonment, told from the perspective of more than 30 years’ remove. It suggests Hannah has come to terms with some of the trauma she faced and has looked for any positive aspect in what must have been a terribly painful time. This passage hints at Hannah’s mental and emotional strength, which she will need in order to make the right decision for Bailey.

“That was probably my favorite part of watching him work: when he would throw up his hands and say, ‘Well, we’ve got to do this different, don’t we?’ Then he’d go about finding a new way into what he wanted to create.” 

Hannah spent a good deal of her childhood watching her grandfather working with wood, which set her own career path in motion. This passage suggests Hannah admired her grandfather’s willingness to change course as needed—not only when working with wood, but also when it came to raising his granddaughter. She adopts this approach for herself, which proves useful both when Owen enters, and departs from, her life.

“Watching my grandfather work taught me that not everything was fluid. There were certain things that you hit from different angles, but you never gave up on. You did the work that was needed, wherever that work took you.” 

This statement suggests Hannah admired her grandfather’s perseverance and willingness to keep with a task. It is a trait Hannah inherited, not only in work, but in her personal life too, as evidenced by how she handles Owen’s disappearance. While others might crumble, remain passive, or cede responsibility to the authorities, Hannah takes it upon herself to solve the mystery of Owen’s disappearance and discern his intentions.

“Was Owen the first customer to notice the table? No, of course not. But he was the first to bend down, just like I’d often do, running his fingers along the sharp metal and holding the table there.”

This passage describes Hannah’s first encounter with Owen—who came into her showroom in Manhattan—and suggests Hannah believed right away that she and Owen were kindred spirits, or at least shared an appreciation for Hannah’s grouping of wood and metal. Wood and metal are the same two elements Hannah uses to make their wedding rings, which indicates she believed their bond was strong and long-lasting, too.

“It’s more than that—what draws me toward Bailey even as she pushes me away. Part of it is that I recognize in her that thing that happens when you lose your mother. My mother left by choice, Bailey’s by tragedy, but it leaves a similar imprint on you either way. It leaves you in the same strange place, trying to figure out how to navigate the world without the most important person watching.” 

The empathy Hannah has for the motherless Bailey makes her more tolerant and patient with her teenage stepdaughter than many people would be. It also drives Hannah’s intense need to protect Bailey at any cost after her father disappears. Had Hannah not also lost her mother, she might have been far less willing to remain in Bailey’s life much less to be her sole parent.

“Bailey, I can’t help this make sense. I’m so sorry. You know what matters about me. And you know what matters about yourself. Please hold on to it. Help Hannah. Do what she tells you. She loves you. We both do. You are my whole life, Dad.” 

The note Owen leaves Bailey, along with a duffle bag full of cash, raises more questions than it answers as Hannah and Bailey struggle to discover what Owen wanted Bailey to remember as having mattered to him. Ultimately, what matters about Owen is the thing he told Hannah that defines him—his willingness to do absolutely anything for his daughter. This knowledge will console Bailey and Hannah as they adjust to life without Owen.

“Sources can’t hide it when they know something. They forget to ask the obvious questions they’d want to know, if they were as in the dark as you were.” 

After Jules tips off Owen about the imminent raid by federal authorities, she is left believing Owen knew the raid was coming, based on his lack of questions. This statement, which Jules tells Hannah the morning after Owen disappears, is something Jules learned from her father and will alert Hannah to the fact that Owen must have known about what was happening at his company but chose to keep it from her.

“I’ve spent my life paying incredibly close attention. When my mother left for good, I didn’t see it coming. I missed it. I missed the finality of that departure. I shouldn’t have.” 

Hannah believes she has developed a keen ability to sense when change is coming based on her observations of others, but ironically, she had no warning or prior knowledge that Owen was about to vanish despite closely and intimately observing him. Hannah will learn that love often blinds people to the flaws in others, and she will have to accept that perhaps her vision of Owen was not quite as clear as she thought it was.

“I can tell myself that I’m sure of Owen’s intentions—that, wherever he is, he’s there because he is trying to protect Bailey. But I’m left sitting here, without him, anyway. Doesn’t that make me as ridiculous as my mother is? Doesn’t it make me the same as her? Both of us putting our faith in someone else above everything else—calling it love. What good is love, if this is where it leads you?” 

As Hannah struggles to make sense of Owen being gone, issues surrounding her own mother’s abandonment resurface and Hannah begins to doubt not only Owen’s character and intentions, but also her own strength and independence. She wrestles with the idea that people are unreliable and that love makes humans vulnerable to being hurt. Ultimately, Hannah decides that it is crucial to accept people as they are, with both good and bad characteristics.

“It’s not that simple. People are going to offer you information that makes it seem like they’re on your side. And Owen’s side. They aren’t. They aren’t on anyone’s side but their own.”

When US Marshal Grady Bradford comes to talk to Hannah, he tries to persuade her that he has Owen’s best interest at heart but that others might not be so well-intentioned. However, as Hannah suspects, Bradford has an agenda, too. And while he might be on Owen’s side, in the end Bradford thinks he knows what Hannah should do and is willing to go to great lengths to make that happen. Bradford is an obstacle around which Hannah must work as she decides what is best for Bailey.

“He’s funny and smart and totally embraced me from the minute I arrived in Sausalito. But he also habitually cheats on his wife, Patricia, and I don’t like knowing that. Owen doesn’t like knowing that either, but he says he’s able to separate it out in his mind because Carl has been such a good friend to him. This is how Owen is. He values the first friend he made in Sausalito more than he judges him.” 

Hannah’s description of Carl Conrad seems, at face value, to be nothing more than a testament to Owen’s willingness to reserve judgment of his friend. But once Hannah learns more about Owen, her husband’s ability to separate things in his mind seems to be a missed red flag signaling his ability to lead a double life and keep secrets for many years. Eventually Hannah sees everyone must do this in one way or another, because this ability to mentally separate aspects of life clears the way for love.

“Maybe we are all fools, one way or another, when it comes to seeing the totality of the people who love us—the people we try to love.” 

When Hannah stops in to see Carl and Patty Conrad, Patty is hostile to her, and Hannah is tempted to take Patty’s smug self-satisfaction down a few notches by telling her that Carl has been cheating on her for years. She resists the urge, though, realizing that all people are guilty of willful blindness when loving someone. At heart, Hannah is a kind person who cannot bring herself to cause Patty pain no matter how gratifying it might be in the moment.

“They didn’t seem to understand about me what Owen understood from the beginning. I had no problem being on my own. My grandfather had raised me to depend on myself. My problems came when I tried to fit myself into someone else’s life, especially when that meant giving up a part of myself in the process. So I waited until I didn’t have to—until it felt like someone fit effortlessly.” 

When Hannah married Owen, she felt judged by the people of Sausalito, who speculated as to why she had still been single at the age of 38. This passage not only speaks to the judgment Hannah felt, but also reflects how Hannah sees herself: strong, independent, and finally with the right man. That makes it doubly unfortunate that Owen leaves, as what Hannah wanted and really valued was a secure home, which Owen could not provide.

“Jake held on to the narrative that because of my history, I was too scared to truly let him in—that I thought he’d leave me like my parents did. He never understood that I wasn’t scared of someone leaving me. I was scared that the wrong person would stay.” 

Jake is Hannah’s former fiancé and the New York lawyer she turns to after Owen disappears. Not only does this passage provide an interesting snapshot of Jake, but it also indicates Hannah believes she no longer has abandonment issues, but fears being attached to the wrong person. Whether that is an accurate assessment is debatable, but it is clearly what Hannah believes about herself.

“He’d taken Bailey to a therapist when she was little, her mom seemingly blocked from her mind. The therapist told Owen this was common. It was a defense mechanism to ease the abandonment of losing a parent as young as Bailey was when she’d lost Olivia. But Owen thought it was bigger than that, and, for some reason, he seemed to blame himself for it.” 

In hindsight, this memory of Owen’s guilty feelings about Bailey’s inability to remember her childhood is a red flag, but Hannah doesn’t yet know what role Owen played in removing Bailey from everything familiar in the wake of her mother’s death. Hannah sees this only as evidence of Owen’s concern for Bailey, which of course it was—but it was also something more sinister.

“The first lesson he ever taught me was that it wasn’t just about shaping a block of wood into what you wanted it to be. That it was also a peeling back, to seeing what was inside the wood, what the wood had been before. It was the first step to creating something beautiful. The first step to making something out of nothing.” 

This lesson about woodworking, which Hannah learned from her grandfather, says something about her approach to people, as well. Hannah seems content, for instance, to let Bailey be who she is rather than try to force her to act in a way that is inconsistent with her true nature. Bailey existed before Hannah arrived, so, like a piece of wood, Hannah values what was there before and patiently waits to see what her relationship with Bailey can organically become. She does not try to force Bailey into a relationship.

“This is the terrible thing about a tragedy. It isn’t with you every minute. You forget it, and then you remember it again. And you see it with a stark quality: This is what is required of you now, just to get along.”

This lesson about the nature of grief, which Hannah learned firsthand as a child, comes back after Owen vanishes when she is taken by surprise by the realization—seemingly out of nowhere—that Owen is truly gone. Knowing this will help Hannah deal with Bailey, who will also have to move through her own grief about losing Owen in the years to come.

“The person you thought you knew, your favorite person, starts to disappear, a mirage, unless you convince yourself the parts that matter are still true. The love was true. His love is true. Because, if it isn’t, the other option is that it was all a lie, and what are you supposed to do with that? What are you supposed to do with any of this? How do you put the pieces together so he doesn’t disappear completely?” 

Betrayal is a tricky thing to navigate, as Hannah explains here. Making sense of it requires holding onto the bits and pieces that align with what is known about a person; otherwise, the alternative is to completely let go and accept the person in question was actually a mirage.

“How do you explain it when you find in someone what you’ve been waiting for your whole life? Do you call it fate? It feels lazy to call it fate. It’s more like finding your way home—where home is a place you secretly hoped for, a place you imagined, but where you’d never before been. Home.” 

To Hannah—who grew up without a stable home until she permanently moved in with her grandfather—home represents a place where one is loved, accepted, valued, and treasured. When Hannah describes loving Owen as feeling like home, she is describing something incredibly valuable. It is the thing she sought her whole life, whether she recognized it or not. Knowing this makes the loss of Owen even that much more painful for Hannah.

“I wasn’t used to being a part of a family, not since I lost my grandfather. And that didn’t exactly feel like a family. That felt like a twosome, plowing our way through the world, just me and him. His funeral was the last time I even saw my mother. Her calls on my birthday (or somewhere around my birthday) were our only form of communication at this point. This was going to be something different. It would be the first time I was a part of an actual family.” 

As Hannah and Owen fly from New York to California shortly before their wedding, Hannah concedes her fears and anxiety about what they are doing. The importance she places on creating a family with Bailey and Owen the right way and for the right reasons will play out over the course of the novel, culminating in the choice Hannah makes to keep Bailey with her.

“Grady is still talking. ‘We just need Bailey to understand that this is the best way to keep her as safe as possible,’ he says. As safe as possible. That stops me. Because he doesn’t just say safe. Because there is no safe. Not anymore.” 

Had Hannah not recognized the equivocation in Grady Bradford’s statement, she might have chosen Witness Protection for herself and Bailey. However, because Hannah hears what Bradford is actually saying—there are no guarantees—she is free to do what she feels is best and what she feels Owen wanted her to do: keep Bailey with her and protect her. Thus, Hannah eschews Bradford’s offer and chooses to live with Bailey but without Owen.

“Charlie looks up at his father, sincere and open. And I understand that I misread his anxiety. Whatever he’s feeling badly about, it doesn’t seem to be about his father, whose hand he still holds. Grady was apparently correct about that much—whoever Nicholas might have been in his professional life, however ugly or dangerous, he’s also the man that puts his hand on his grown son’s shoulder and offers him a nightcap after a hard night at work. That’s who Charlie sees.” 

When Hannah goes to visit Nicholas Bell, she witnesses a tender moment between Bell and his son, Charlie, and realizes that much like she clings to what she wants to know and believe about Owen, Charlie clings to those same things about his father. Humans do this in loving others—focusing on likeable traits which reinforce the love and disregarding things that threaten the relationship. Seeing Bell as human, rather than as a monster, clears the path for Hannah to negotiate with Bell for Bailey’s safety.