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

by Laura Dave

Owen used to like to tease me about how I lose everything, about how, in my own way, I have raised losing things to an art form. Sunglasses, keys, mittens, baseball hats, stamps, cameras, cell phones, Coke bottles, pens, shoelaces. Socks. Lightbulbs. Ice trays. He isn’t exactly wrong. I did used to have a tendency to misplace things. To get distracted. To forget.

Thank you to my wonderful readers. I am so grateful to you all for joining me on Hannah Hall’s journey—which I started working on all the way back in 2012. Eighteen drafts later, you have the book that is now on your shelves. (Can I mention again how grateful I am that it is?) When I’m working on a book, I always start with a question I want to explore. For The Last Thing He Told Me, my question was: Can we ever truly know the people we love the most? From the moment Hannah receives Owen’s note (Protect Her), she is trying to answer this question. One of the great joys of bringing this book into the world has been hearing the many ways people answer this question for themselves.

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.

When my husband and I got married, good friends gave us a gorgeous woodturned bowl for a wedding present. That was the first I learned of woodturning, and I became enamored with the artform, which involves strength, patience, skill, precision, and faith—all traits I wanted to infuse in Hannah. I loved discovering the way her work (and how watching her grandfather work) informed her journey—helping to keep her one step ahead, helping her to not give up even in such an impossible situation.

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.

I definitely think this is true. Or, at least, it certainly feels true for Hannah. I like to think that one of the great tricks of love—of loving someone over the course of a lifetime—is loving that person despite what we inevitably learn as people shift and change. And, hopefully, some of what we learn (maybe even most of what we learn) is to the good.

He never understood that I wasn’t scared of someone leaving me. I was scared that the wrong person would stay.

I really relate to this. So often in fiction or in the movies, we see a character subsumed with an unrequited love interest. I like the idea that Hannah wasn’t in that position. Rather, she was always independent—and the grace that allowed her to let Owen in wasn’t about wanting love from just anyone, but rather it was about trusting that Owen was the someone for her.

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 line breaks my heart, especially because when Hannah came to it, she was in such a dark place—no closer to finding her husband, still unsure how to be there for Bailey. Thankfully, she gets herself to somewhere better.

“My grandfather used to say that most people don’t want to hear the thing that will make it work better,” I said. “They want to hear what will make it easier.”

Have you ever found yourself calling someone for advice, knowing that the advice will reaffirm your desire to take the easy way out? I certainly have. But Hannah’s grandfather is a truth-teller, so she knows (even if she doesn’t want to know) that the easy road is often not the road that you need to take.

“Einstein said, So far as the theories of mathematics are about reality, they are not certain; so far as they are certain, they are not about reality.”

I read everything I can get my hands on—thrillers, fiction, memoirs, science books, short stories. All of it. And when I come across a quote I love (like this one from Einstein), I file it away in a big purple book I have with my favorite quotes in it. Sometimes, down the road, while I’m creating a character, I think… this person would relate to this quote too.

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.

Well, isn’t this love, after all? At its best, I like to believe, true love feels like the ultimate homecoming.

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.

This is all about Nicholas. Angry, broken Nicholas. For Hannah to strike the deal with him that she does, I had to believe—I had to believe that Hannah believed—the parts of Nicholas that were compromised were still connected to the parts of him that were genuine. That, at the end of the day, like all of us, he would want to do what he could for his family.

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.

Yes to this! I do believe that loving anyone (even someone who has tried to be completely honest with you) is often like peeling back an onion, isn’t it? We see new things over time. We understand our people differently. We evolve. They evolve. And the trick to loving someone over a lifetime is to allow for this evolution, to embrace it, to keep going. To keep believing.

It’s never about someone else the moment you realize it is up to you to get yourself to a better place. It’s only about figuring out how to get there.

I definitely find this to be true in my own life. There are moments where you realize you are the one that needs to show up for yourself if you want to make real changes in your life. The trick is being brave enough to do it.

“Mom,” she says.

The last line of the book. I worked on this book for many years, on and off, and had many different endings that I considered along the way. But it was after I gave birth to my son in 2016 that I realized Hannah’s story, in the most primal sense, was the story of becoming a mother. For me, the book is the call to that—and the ending is the answer. I’m excited to share that I’m finishing work on the sequel to The Last Thing He Told Me. So it is seems like this ending will turn out to be more of an intermission… and this family will have a new act, after all. Coming winter 2026!!