The Last Thing He Told Me (Hannah Hall, #1)

by Laura Dave

how he’d grilled me that night, asking endless questions about my past—about the men I’d left behind, the men who had left me. He’d called them the could-have-been boys. He raised a glass to them and said, wherever they were, he was grateful to them for not being what I needed, so he got to be the one sitting across from me.

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.

Bailey almost tries with me. That’s the worst part. She isn’t a bad kid or a menace. She’s a good kid in a situation she hates. I just happen to be that situation.

This is how Owen is. He values the first friend he made in Sausalito more than he judges him. I know that’s how my husband works.

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.

From this far away, they all look happy. Though, of course, I don’t really know.

“So… it wasn’t just him, right?” she says. “If he did this, I’m not who he said I am either then, right? My name and everything… at some point he changed it.” “Yes,” I say. “If Jake’s correct, then, yes, you used to go by something else as well.” “And all the details are different too, right?” She pauses. “Like… my birthday?” That stops me. The heartbreak in her voice when she asks that question. “Like my birthday’s not really my birthday?” she says. “No, probably not.” She looks down. She looks away from me. “That seems like something a person should know about themselves,” she says.

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.

sometimes you find your way to the place that wants you most.”

I see it in her eyes—her sadness moving into anger. It will move back again and from there into grief. A fierce, lonely, necessary circle as she starts to grapple with this. How do you begin to grapple with this? You just do. You surrender. You surrender to how you feel. To the unfairness. But not to despair. I won’t let her despair, if it’s the only thing I manage to do.

When the world gets quiet again, it will take everything I am not to allow the grief of his loss to level me.