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“You became the opposite,” I said.
“I think that might just be the single best thing anyone has ever said to me,” he said.
“It’s true,” I said.
And it was true. Owen was the opposite. He had felt like the opposite from day one, from that first meeting in my workshop, but it was more than just a feeling now. He had proven himself to be the opposite. It wasn’t just that it was easy to be with him (though it was) or that I felt deepened by him in a way I never had in a relationship before. It wasn’t even that we understood each other in that elusive way that you either had with someone or you could never quite find—that pervasive shorthand in which a look could tell us what the other person needed: Time to leave the party; Time to reach for me; Time to give me room to breathe.
It was a little bit of all of that and something far bigger than all of that. 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. When you weren’t sure you’d ever get to have one.
That’s what he was to me. That’s who he was.
Owen pulled my palm to his lips, held me there. “So… are you going to answer my question about how it feels?” he said. “To be a married woman?”
I shrugged. “Not sure yet,” I said. “Too soon to tell.”
He laughed. “Okay, well, that’s all right,” he said.
I took a sip of my champagne. I took a sip, and laughed too. I couldn’t help it. I was happy. I was just… happy.
“Turns out you have a little while to decide,” he said.
“Like the rest of our lives?” I said.
“I hope longer than that,” he said.
If You Marry the Prom King…
Seventy-three names, fifty of them men.
One of them is potentially Owen.
We walk quickly across campus toward the main research library, which Cheryl tells us is most likely to house the school yearbooks. If we can get our hands on the yearbooks from the years Owen was at UT, that could be the key to getting through this list as quickly as possible. The yearbooks will offer not just student names, but they’ll offer photographs too. They’ll potentially have a photograph of a young Owen, if he did anything at school besides fail math.
We head inside the Perry-Castañeda Library, which is enormous—six stories of books and maps and cards and computer labs—and head to the research librarian’s desk. She informs us that we will need to put a request in at the archives to get the hard copies of the school yearbooks from that far back, but we can access the archive on a library computer.
We go to the second-floor computer lab, which is mostly empty, and sit at two computers in the corner. I pull up Owen’s freshman and sophomore yearbooks on one computer. And Bailey pulls up his junior and senior years. And, side by side, we begin looking up students from Cookman’s class one at a time, hitting the roster alphabetically. Our first candidate: John Abbot from Baltimore, Maryland. I find him in one grainy photograph with the ski club. He doesn’t look much like Owen in the photograph—thick glasses, full beard—but it is hard to rule him out completely just based on that one photograph. We find too many potential hits when we google just his name, but when I cross-reference with skiing, I find that John Abbot (Baltimore native, UT-Austin grad) now lives in Aspen with his partner and their two kids.
We are able to rule out the next few male students on the list much more easily: one is five feet tall and has curly red hair; another is six foot four and a professional ballet dancer who resides in Paris; one is living in Honolulu, Hawaii, and running for state senate.
We are on the Es when my phone rings. HOME comes up on the caller ID. For a second, I imagine that it’s Owen. Owen is back at the house, and calling to tell us that he has worked everything out, and we need to come home immediately. So he can explain the parts that don’t make sense. Where he has been, who he was before I knew him. Why he has left these things out.
But it isn’t Owen on the phone. It’s Jules.
Jules is responding to the text I’d sent her at the hotel bar, asking her to head to the house, asking her to find the piggy bank.
“I’m in Bailey’s room,” she says when I pick up.
“Was anyone outside?” I say.
“I don’t think so. I didn’t see anyone strange in the parking lot, and there wasn’t anyone on the docks.”
“Would you close the blinds while you’re there?”
“Already done,” she said.
I look over at Bailey, hoping she’s too busy with the yearbooks to pay close attention. But I clock her eyeing me, waiting to see what this phone call is about. Maybe hoping, against hope, this is going to be the call that gets her back to her father.
