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.”
“What’s your point?” he says.
“I want to make you a deal.”
He starts to laugh. “We’re back to this? Darling, you don’t know what you’re saying. It’s not your deal to make.”
“I think it is.”
“How do you figure?”
I take a deep breath, knowing this is the moment of truth with Nicholas. It all comes down to how I sell him this. He’ll hear me now or he won’t. And the only thing that hangs in the balance is my family’s future. My identity. Bailey’s identity. Owen’s life.
“I think that my husband would rather be killed than let you near your granddaughter. That’s what I think. He proved that by uprooting everything and moving her away from here. As angry as you are about that, you respect him for being that kind of father. You didn’t think he had that in him.”
Nicholas doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t look away either. He holds my eyes with his. I sense he’s getting angry, a little too angry, but I keep going.
“And I assume you would like to have a relationship with your granddaughter? I think you want a relationship with her more than almost anything. That you’d be willing to make arrangements with your former colleagues to allow that to happen. From what you’re saying, you can insist they leave us alone, let us keep living our lives,” I say. “If you want to know your granddaughter, I think you know it’s your only play. Either that or letting her disappear again. Because that is the other option, that is what I’m being told is the option I should be considering. WITSEC, starting over. Your granddaughter no longer allowed to be your granddaughter. Again.”
And, like that. It happens. Like a flip has been switched, Nicholas’s eyes going dark, going empty. His face pulsing red.
“What did you just say?” he says.
He stands up. I push back my chair, almost before I know I’m doing it. I push back closer to the door, as if it’s possible he’s going to lunge for me. It feels possible. Anything feels possible suddenly unless I get out of this room. Until I get away from him.
“I don’t like to be threatened,” Nicholas says.
“I’m not threatening you,” I say, trying to hold my voice steady. “That wasn’t my intention.”
“So what is your intention?”
“I’m asking you to help me keep your granddaughter safe,” I say. “I’m asking you to put me in a position where she can know her family. Where she can know you.”
He doesn’t sit back down. He stares at me. For a long time. For what feels like a long time.
“These other gentlemen,” he says, “my former employers… I could potentially work something out with them. It would cost me quite a bit of capital. And they certainly would wonder who I am becoming in my old age. But… I think we could make sure they leave you and my granddaughter alone.”
I nod, my throat catching as I start to ask the question, the next question I need to ask.
“And Ethan?” I say.
“No, not Ethan,” he says.
He says it without equivocation. He says it with finality.
“If Ethan were to return, I couldn’t assure you of his safety,” he says. “His debt is too large. As I said, I can’t protect Ethan, even if I were inclined to. Which, to be clear with you, I’m not.”
I was prepared for this, for this intractable position. I was as prepared as I could get—a tiny part of me believing I wasn’t going to have to acquiesce to it. To do what I came here to do. A tiny part of me in disbelief even as I start to do it.
“But your granddaughter,” I say. “You could keep her safe? That’s what you’re saying?”
“Potentially, yes.”
I stay quiet for a moment. I stay quiet until I trust myself to speak. “Okay then,” I say.
“Okay then?” he says. “Okay then, what?”
“I’d like you to speak with your former employers about doing that,” I say.
He doesn’t even try to hide just how confused he is. He is confused because he thought he knew what I was doing here. He thought I was going to beg for Owen’s life, for his safety. He doesn’t understand that this is exactly what I’m doing, even if it doesn’t look like it.
“Do you understand what you’re considering here?” he says.
I’m considering an Owen-less life. That’s what. A life that isn’t anything like what I’d imagined for myself, but a life where Bailey gets to stay Bailey. She gets to stay the young woman she’s become under Owen’s watchful eye, the one he is so proud of. She’ll continue to live her life, heading to college in two years, heading to whatever life she wants, not as someone else—not as someone
