The Last Thing He Told Me

by Laura Dave

  I follow Nicholas into his home office and take it in—the dark leather chairs and reading lamps, the mahogany bookshelves. Encyclopedias and classic books line the shelves. Nicholas Bell’s diplomas and accolades hang on the walls. Summa cum laude. Phi Beta Kappa. Law Review. They are framed, proudly.

  His office feels different from the rest of the house. It feels more personal. The room is filled with photographs of his family—on the walls, on the credenza, on the bookshelves. The desk is devoted entirely to photographs of Bailey, though. Photographs that are framed in sterling silver, photographs that are blown up into twice their normal sizes. They are all of small Bailey with her dark eyes, wide like saucers. And her tender curls—none of them yet purple.

  Then there is her mother, Kate. She holds Bailey in nearly every photograph displayed: Bailey and Kate eating ice cream; Bailey and Kate cuddling on a park bench. I focus on one of Bailey at a few days old, in a little blue beanie. Kate lies in bed with her, her lips to Bailey’s lips, her forehead against her forehead. It just about breaks my heart. And I assume that is why Nicholas keeps it in his view—why he keeps all of them in view—so every day they will just about break his.

  This is the thing about good and evil. They aren’t so far apart—and they often start from the same valiant place of wanting something to be different.

  Ned remains in the hallway. Nicholas nods in his direction, and he closes the door. The thick, oak door. The bodyguard is in the hallway, the dogs in the hallway.

  And the two of us are inside the office, alone.

  Nicholas walks over to the bar and pours us each a drink. Then he hands mine over and takes a seat behind his desk, leaving me the chair in front of it—a deep, leather chair with gold etchings.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” he says.

  I sit down with my drink in my hand. But I’m not happy about having my back to the door. I have the thought, for a second, that it isn’t impossible someone could walk in and shoot me. One of the bodyguards could surprise me, the dogs could spring to action. Charlie himself could storm in. Maybe I have misunderstood what Owen put in his will. Maybe in this attempt to get Bailey and Owen out of what I have gotten them deeper into, I have left myself alone in the lion’s den. A sacrifice. In the name of Kate. Or Owen. Or Bailey.

  I remind myself that’s okay. If I do what I came here to do, I’ll accept that.

  I put my drink down. And my eyes travel back to the photographs of baby Bailey. I notice one of her in a party dress, a bow wrapped around her head.

  It provides me some comfort, which Nicholas seems to notice. He picks it up and hands it to me.

  “That was Kristin’s second birthday. She was already talking in full sentences. It was amazing. I took her to the park, maybe the week after that, and we ran into her pediatrician. He asked her how she was doing and she gave him a two-paragraph answer,” he says. “He couldn’t believe it.”

  I hold the photograph in my hands. Bailey stares back at me, those curls a prelude to her whole personality.

  “I believe it,” I say.

  Nicholas clears his throat. “I take it she’s still like that?”

  “No,” I say. “Monosyllables are more her speed these days, at least when it comes to me. But, in general, yes. In general, she is a star.”

  I look up and see Nicholas’s face. He looks angry. I’m not sure why. Is he mad that I have done something to make Bailey not like me the way I wish she would? Or is he mad he has never been given the chance himself?

  I hand him back his photograph. He places it back on his desk, moving it obsessively to the place where it was before, keeping each piece of her that he has exactly where he can find it. It feels like a bit of magical thinking, like if he holds on to her just so, that will help him find her again.

  “So, Hannah, what can I do for you, exactly?”

  “Well, I am hoping we can come to an agreement, Mr. Bell.”

  “Nicholas, please,” he says.

  “Nicholas,” I say.

  “And no.”

  I take a breath, moving forward in my seat. “You didn’t even hear what I have to say yet.”

  “What I mean is no, that’s not why you’re here, to come to an agreement,” he says. “We both know that. You’re here in the hopes that I’m not who everyone is telling you I am.”

  “That’s not true,” I say. “I’m not interested in who was right or who was wrong here.”

  “That’s good,” he says, “because I don’t think you’d like the real answer. People don’t tend to work that way. We have our opinion and we filter information into a paradigm that supports it.”

  “Not a big believer that people can change their minds?” I say.

  “Does that surprise you?”

  “Not usually, but you’re a lawyer,” I say. “Isn’t convincing people a large part of the job?”

  He smiles. “I think that you’re confusing me with a prosecutor,” he says. “A defense attorney, at least a good defense attorney, never tries to convince anyone of anything. We do the opposite. We remind everyone you can’t know anything for sure.”

  Nicholas reaches for the brown box on his desk, a smoke box. He opens the lid and takes out a cigarette.

  “I won’t ask if you want one. Disgusting habit, I know. But I started smoking when I was a teenager, there wasn’t much else to do in the town I came from. And I started smoking again in prison, same issue,” he says. “Haven’t been able to kick it since. When my wife was still with us, I’d try. Got those nicotine patches. Have you seen those? They help if you have the discipline, but I don’t pretend to anymore. Not since I lost my wife… What’s the point? Charlie gives me grief about it, but there isn’t much he can do. I figure I’m an old man. Something else will get me first.”

  He puts the cigarette to his mouth, silver lighter in hand.

  “I’d like to tell you a little story, if you’ll indulge me,” he says. “Have you heard of Harris Gray?”

  “I don’t think so,” I say.

  He lights up, takes a long inhale.

  “No, of course not. Why would you have? He introduced me to my former employers,” he says. “He was twenty-one when I first met him and very low on the totem pole. If he had been any more senior, the gentlemen at the head of the organization would have called in one of their in-house lawyers to help him out and I wouldn’t be sitting across from you now. But he wasn’t. And so I was called in to defend him by the city of Austin. Random assignment sent to the public defender’s office on a night I was working late. Harris was caught with some OxyContin. Not a ton, but enough. He was charged with intent to distribute. Which, needless to say, was his intent.” He takes another drag. “My point is, I did my job, maybe a little too well. Usually Harris gets locked up for a period of time, thirty-six months, maybe seventy-two in front of the wrong judge. But I got him off.”

  “How did you do that?” I ask.

  “The way you do anything well,” he says. “I paid attention. And the prosecutor didn’t expect that. He was sloppy. He didn’t disclose some of the exculpatory evidence, so I got the case dismissed. And Harris went free. After that, his employers asked to meet me. They were impressed. They wanted to tell me so. And they wanted me to do it again for other members of their organization who found themselves in trouble.”

  I don’t know what he expects me to say, but he looks at me, perhaps just to make sure I’m listening.

  “These gentlemen at the head of Harris’s organization decided I showed the kind of prowess that was integral to keeping their workforce… working. So they flew me and my wife to South Florida on a private plane. I had never flown first class before, let alone on a private plane. But they flew me there on their plane and put us up in a waterfront hotel suite with our own butler and made me a business proposition, one that felt difficult to say no to.” He pauses. “I’m not quite sure why I mention the plane or the oceanfront butler. Maybe to suggest to you I was more than slightly out of my depth wi
th my employers. Not that I’m saying that I didn’t have a choice in working for them. I believe you always have a choice. And the choice I made was to defend people who, by law, deserve a proper defense. There’s honor in that. I never lied to my family about it. I spared them some of the details, but they knew the general picture and they knew I didn’t cross any lines. I did my job. I took care of my family. At the end of the day, it’s not all that different from working for a tobacco company,” he says. “The same moral calculation needs to be made.”

  “Except I wouldn’t work for a tobacco company either,” I say.

  “Well, we don’t all have the luxury of your strict moral code,” he says.

  There’s an edge to how he says this. I’m taking a chance, arguing with him, except it occurs to me that this may be precisely why he is walking me through his history, the version of it he wants me to see. To test me. To test whether I’m going to do exactly that—argue, engage. This has to be why he presented his story this way—this is the first test. He wants to see whether I’ll blindly let him spin in order to ingratiate myself to him or whether I’ll be human.

  “It’s not that my moral code is so strict, but it seems to me that your employers are causing all sorts of harm and you knew that,” I say. “And you still chose to help them.”

  “Oh, is that the distinction?” he says. “Do no harm? What about the harm you do when you rip a child from her family right after she loses her mother? What about the harm you do when you deprive that child of knowing everyone who could have reminded her of her mother? Everyone who loved her?”

  That stops me. And I understand it now. Nicholas didn’t run me through his story to present himself in a better light or to see if I’d engage with him. He told me so I’d lead him here, exactly to this place, where he could put his fury out there. He wanted to wound me with it. He wanted to wound me with the harm Owen caused—with the price of what he chose to do.

  “I think it’s his hypocrisy that I find the most staggering,” he says. “Considering that Ethan knew exactly what I was doing and what I wasn’t doing for my employers. He knew more than my own children. In part because he knew about encryption and computers. In part because he and I became close and I let him in. Let’s just say he helped me do certain things. That’s how he was able to cause the trouble that he did.”

  I don’t know how to argue with that. I don’t know how to argue with Nicholas about any of this. This is how he sees himself, as a family man, as a wronged man. And he sees Owen as the man who wronged him, which makes Owen just as guilty as he is. I can’t argue with something so intrinsic to his understanding of himself. So I decide not to. I decide to go another way.

  “I don’t think you’re wrong about that,” I say.

  “No?” he says.

  “The one thing I know about my husband is that he would do anything for his family. And that’s who you were to him, so I imagine he was quite involved with whatever you asked him to be involved with.” I pause. “Until he decided he couldn’t be anymore.”

  “I’d already been working for my employer for a long time when Ethan came into my daughter’s life,” he says. “For other clients too, mind you. I continued to fight for people you’d approve of, I still work for those clients, though I’m sure you’re less interested in my good deeds.”

  I don’t say anything. He isn’t looking for me to say anything. He is looking to make his point, which is when he starts to get there.

  “Ethan blamed me for what happened to Kate. He blamed the men I worked for when they had nothing to do with it. She was working for a Texas Supreme Court judge, a very influential Texas Supreme Court judge? Did you know that?”

  I nod. “I did.”

  “Did you know this judge had shifted the Texas court sharply to the left and was imminently set to cast the deciding vote against a large energy corporation, the second largest in the country? If you want to talk about real criminals, these gentlemen were dispelling highly toxic chemicals into the atmosphere at a clip that could make your eyes swell shut.”

  He watches me.

  “My point is that this judge, Kate’s boss, was writing a majority opinion against the corporation. It would lead to sweeping reform and cost the energy corporation close to six billion dollars in improved conservation efforts. And the day after my daughter was killed, the judge came home to a bullet in his mailbox. What does that sound like to you? A coincidence? Or a warning shot?”

  “I don’t know enough,” I say.

  “Well, Ethan decided he knew enough. He couldn’t be reasoned with that the men I had spent two decades protecting wouldn’t do that to my daughter. That I knew these men and they had their own code of honor. That wasn’t how they did things. Even their most nefarious colleagues didn’t do things like that unprompted. But Ethan didn’t want to believe it. He just wanted to blame me. And he wanted to punish me. As if I wasn’t punished enough.” He pauses. “There is nothing worse than losing your child. Nothing. Especially when you are someone who lives his life for his family.”

  “I understand that,” I say.

  “Your husband didn’t. That was the part he could never understand about me,” he says. “After his testimony, I spent six and a half years in prison as opposed to putting my family at risk by sharing my employer’s secrets. Which they also view as service. So my employers continue to be generous with me now. Even though I’m retired, they consider me family.”

  “Even though your son-in-law caused many of them to go to prison?” I say.

  “The people in the organization that were sent to jail along with me were mostly lower level,” Nicholas says. “I took the hit for the upper management. They haven’t forgotten that. They won’t.”

  “So you could ask them to spare Ethan? Theoretically? If you wanted to?”

  “Haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been telling you?” he says. “I have no desire to do that. Besides, I can’t pay off his debt. No one can.”

  “You just said they’d do anything for you.”

  “Maybe that’s what you wanted to hear,” he says. “What I said was they are generous with me about certain things. Not everything. Even families don’t let everything go.”

  “No,” I say. “I guess they don’t.”

  This is when I realize something else that is going on. I figure it out in what Nicholas isn’t owning—not yet, at least.

  “You never liked Ethan, did you?” I say.

  “Excuse me?” he says.

  “Even before all of this, when you first met him, he wasn’t your choice. For your daughter. This poor kid from South Texas, wanting to marry your only daughter. That couldn’t have been what you wanted for her. He could have been you. He grew up in a town like the one you came from. He was a little too much like what you had organized your life to be better than.”

  “Are you a therapist?”

  “Not at all,” I say. “I just pay attention.”

  He looks at me amused. Apparently he likes this. He likes me throwing his words back at him.

  “So what are you asking me?” he says.

  “Everything you did, you did so your children would have different choices than you did. Kate. Charlie. Easier choices. So they’d have a promising childhood. The best schools, the greatest possibilities. So they wouldn’t have to struggle so hard. And yet, one of your children drops out of architecture school and decides to take over your wife’s family bar. Gets divorced.”

  “Careful,” he says.

  “And the other one chooses someone who was the last person you’d want for her.”

  “As my wife used to say, we don’t get to pick who our children love. I made my peace that she chose Ethan. I just wanted her to be happy.”

  “But you had a feeling, didn’t you? He wasn’t the best person for Kate, he wasn’t going to make her happy.”

  Nicholas leans forward, his smile gone.

  “Did you know when Kate and Ethan started dating she didn’t speak to m
e for a year?”

  “I didn’t even know Kate existed yesterday,” I say. “So the details as to how that relationship played out aren’t something I’m familiar with.”

  “She was a freshman in college and she decided she didn’t want to have anything to do with us. With me, rather… her mother she never stopped talking to,” he says. “That was Ethan’s influence on her. We came through it though. Kate came home again and we made peace. That’s what daughters do. They love their fathers. And Ethan and I…”

  “You came to trust him?” I say.

  “I did. I clearly shouldn’t have,” he says. “But I did. I could tell you one story about your husband and you’d never see him the same way again.”

  I stay quiet. Because I know Nicholas is telling the truth, at least the way he sees it. Owen, in his eyes, is bad. He has done bad things to Nicholas. He betrayed his trust. He stole his granddaughter. He disappeared.

  Nicholas isn’t wrong about any of that. He may not even be wrong about me. If I choose to wade into the chasm of doubt Nicholas wants to create about Owen, it won’t be hard to go there. Owen isn’t who I thought he was, at least not in the details. There are parts I wish didn’t exist, parts I can’t look away from now. In one way or another, this is the deal we all sign when we love someone. For better or worse. It’s the deal we have to sign again and again to keep that love. We don’t turn away from the parts of someone we don’t want to see. However quickly or long it takes to see them. We accept them if we are strong enough. Or we accept them enough to not let the bad parts become the entire story.

  Because there is this too. The details are not the whole story. The whole story still includes this: I love Owen. I love him, and Nicholas isn’t going to sway me that I shouldn’t. He isn’t going to sway me that I’ve been fooled. Despite everything, despite any evidence to the contrary, I believe I haven’t. I believe I know my husband, the pieces and parts that matter most. It’s why I’m sitting here. It’s why I say what I say next.

  “Regardless of that,” I say, “I think you know how much my husband loves your granddaughter.”