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Summary: Chapters 13–15
Chapter 13: Keep Austin Weird
On the flight, Bailey is uninterested in talking, so Hannah occupies herself with planning their time in Texas. Noticing that Bailey seems cold, she chides herself for not reminding her to bring a sweatshirt. When they order sodas from the flight attendant, Bailey becomes upset when the woman assumes Hannah is her mother. The realization that she is now dependent on her stepmother, though, leaves the teen uncomfortable, and then she makes up a ruse about their drinks to engage with Hannah.
Everything is in Hannah’s and Bailey’s names, but Jules booked their flights and hotel to protect their privacy. As they ride in from the airport, their Uber driver tries to engage an unresponsive Bailey in conversation by explaining that a building on the University of Texas campus has a theme that features a rival university’s mascot. Bailey finds all intrusions irksome both here and later at the hotel.
Settled into their hotel, Hannah and Bailey decide to walk to the university’s stadium and, on the way, Bailey recognizes Antone’s, a blues club, from her father’s record albums. Mainly, however, she looks at her phone, no matter how much her stepmother urges her to remain alert for clues that might jog her memory. When they arrive, Hannah asks if she wants to go into the stadium, and the two join an ongoing tour, bemused as Owen has never expressed any interest in football. Things seem vaguely familiar to Bailey, who thinks she remembers walking to a nearby church, where a wedding was held. According to Hannah’s map, there are several churches within easy walking distance.
Chapter 14: Who Needs a Tour Guide?
As they leave the stadium, Bailey increasingly finds the surroundings familiar and wants to proceed slowly. Hannah’s priorities differ—she wants to get to the churches quickly—but accedes to Bailey’s needs. From other information they have, they deduce that Bailey and Owen were likely here in 2008. A call from Belle interrupts their search. Ranting about Avett’s innocence, Belle strikes Hannah as unhinged and then wonders if she sounds the same way. Yet, when Belle asks whether Owen has talked to the police, Hannah realizes she knows Avett is guilty and is hoping he can avoid his actions’ consequences.
After the call, Hannah lies to Bailey that it was a wrong number, a lie Bailey easily disproves. Determined to be more forthright with her stepdaughter, Hannah shares the contents of the call and asks that they hurry to the churches. Even though she is overwhelmed by the information, Bailey expresses gratitude for Hannah’s trust.
Chapter 15: Three Months Ago
Hannah recalls a night the family spent the night in a San Francisco hotel, driven out of the houseboat by flooding. Waking up alone in their room in the early hours of the morning, Hannah went down to the hotel bar, where she found Owen with Bailey’s piggy bank. He seems stressed and shares his sadness that Bailey wanted to go with her boyfriend’s family instead of them. They joke that it is weird to take a piggy bank drinking, although Owen cannot shake his concern that Bailey will wake up and find them both gone.
Analysis
By shifting the action to Austin, a strange location for the characters, the novel indicates a critical shift in Hannah’s approach to the investigation. Before this point, Hannah has interacted with a familiar environment, even if it is one she does not consider home, and she tends to trust what she thinks she knows about her husband. But the journey to unfamiliar territory symbolizes a drastic change in her mindset. By traveling to Austin, Hannah acknowledges that there is more to Owen’s past and that she cannot learn about his past if she limits herself to what she already knows. She has to leave the familiar behind, both in terms of the literal location of Sausalito and the assumptions she has about her husband.
Bailey’s circumstances as a teenager, caught between childhood and adulthood, also come into focus in this section. When Austin residents see an adolescent visiting the town with a parental figure in tow, they assume that Hannah and Bailey are there to tour the university. Bailey appearing ready for college confirms she is on the very cusp of adulthood and flags a key issue she has with how Hannah treats her. Hannah keeps wanting to be an actively maternal figure, who does things like tell Bailey what to pack, but in doing so, she is thinking of Bailey as a little girl rather than a young woman who will soon be responsible for making those decisions on her own. In Bailey’s outburst about Belle’s phone call, she decries Hannah’s well-meaning attempts to shield her from the truth. Hannah sees Bailey as a child she must protect, whereas Bailey sees herself as an almost-adult whom Hannah should treat as a more equal partner in the endeavor.
The shift in location also signals a shift in the novel’s investment from Hannah’s memories toward Bailey’s memories. Prior to this point, Bailey’s memories are incidental. Indeed, since Hannah is the narrator, her memories of Owen and her attempts to make sense of them are a main focus of the narrative. Once they travel to Austin, Hannah’s memories of Owen diminish somewhat in importance as the focus instead becomes what Bailey remembers. Hannah recognizes that Bailey’s memories are critical, so she also shifts her efforts to jogging Bailey’s memory rather than dwelling on parsing meaning from her own. Just as Hannah becomes more focused on Bailey’s memories, so too do readers. Bailey’s memories remain filtered through Hannah’s perspective since she is the narrator, but now readers must also turn their attention to pondering the clues in Bailey’s memories rather than puzzling out what was true and what was false in Hannah’s.
These chapters also demonstrate the significance of hidden knowledge and clues hiding in plain sight and how the characters must actively work to decode them. As the Uber driver explains to Hannah and Bailey, he firmly believes that the architects from Rice University designed one of Austin’s landmark buildings as a hidden jab at their rival. His throwaway anecdote mirrors exactly what Hannah wants Bailey to do, decipher a hidden meaning from apparent knowledge. In Hannah’s case, she hopes that Bailey will be able to construct more evidence about Owen’s past from the fragmented memories she has of spending time in Austin. This section also introduces what ultimately proves to be a pivotal hidden message in the course of the story—the piggy bank. Just as many Austin residents do not see the resemblance between the tower and the Rice mascot, Bailey does not immediately recognize the significance in revisiting the stadium nor does Hannah instantly see the importance of the piggy bank. However, to successfully learn more about Owen, both Hannah and Bailey must make these connections and read between the lines, just as the driver has done with the building.
