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Summary: Chapters 23–26
Chapter 23: It’s Science, Isn’t It?
As the women take a cab to the campus, Hannah worries about what this new clue might reveal. She manages to talk Tobias’s graduate student into directing them to his class by falsely claiming that Bailey hopes to attend the university. After the class ends, the women approach Tobias, who chastises them for disrupting his class. Hannah apologizes but persists, asking for his help and urging Bailey to show him a picture of her father. Annoyed at their continued interruptions, Tobias says he has no memory of him, pointing out that he’s had many students across his long career. Hannah’s sadly explains that this is their only clue, given Owen’s lies, and they had hoped he might remember, since Owen had said he was the professor’s worst student ever, so dreadful that the man framed his final exam as a warning to others. This detail resonates with Tobias, who invites them back to his office.
Chapter 24: Some Students Are Better Than Others
Tobias recruits his graduate students to scour his old records, looking for possible candidates. As they discuss how difficult it is proving to differentiate between what is true and what is false in Owen’s life, Tobias quotes Albert Einstein, saying that nobody really knows anything. As the women prepare to leave the office, with the class roster from the course Owen probably had taken, Tobias adds some further recollections, that his impression was that Owen was a good person so thoroughly in love with a classmate that he flunked the test. Hannah and Bailey realize that this classmate was likely Bailey’s mother, Olivia.
Chapter 25: Fourteen Months Ago
Hannah thinks back on the evening of her wedding. She and Owen sat together at a restaurant after the reception. The conversation turns to her previous boyfriends, as Owen celebrates to not number among that unhappy group. Hannah too is happy as she reflects on the difference between their emotional connection and all her previous romantic relationships.
Chapter 26: If You Marry the Prom King. . .
Using the class roster, Hannah and Bailey systematically work their way through college yearbooks. Jules contacts Hannah and confirms her suspicion that the piggy bank said Lady Paul on its side. The will Owen had in his computer listed L. Paul as his executor, so Hannah concludes the piggy bank hides a secret Owen wanted to safeguard. Confirming this suspicion, Jules explains that the piggy bank has a safe inside it, which requires a specialized locksmith to open. Another piece of the puzzle falls into place when Elenor calls Hannah with the news that there was one wedding that matches their criteria, during a preseason scrimmage. Charlie Smith and Andrea Reyes were married in 2008. There is a Katherine Smith on Tobias’s class roster—and her yearbook portrait looks a great deal like Bailey. A caption in the yearbook mentions the Smith family bar, the Never Dry, which Bailey says she remembers. Although they differ on next steps—Hannah wants to look for Owen in the yearbooks, Bailey wants to go to the Never Dry—they decide to look for the Smith family at the bar.
Analysis
The characters repeatedly connect through the power of stories in this section. Stories even become a means of bonding among Hannah, Bailey, and Tobias as they share Owen’s stories with one another. The characters use these stories to reinforce their respective views of Owen as a good person while also trying to reconcile them with the fact that he is a liar who abandoned his family. As such, there are limits to the power of stories. Owen’s stories prove an important clue to establish his real identity, but he embedded them in lies about his name and where he went to college. Hannah, Bailey, and Tobias also hit a roadblock when Owen’s story about college does not quite match Tobias’s memory. For all of Owen’s emphasis on being the professor’s worst student, Tobias does not remember him that way, only remembering the detail about framing the bad test. Each person tells their own story, shaping it according to their memories and needs. Thus, characters are better able to understand the power of stories when they also accept their limits.
In these chapters, Owen’s interest in mathematical theory uncovers key aspects of his personality, offering a different perspective on uncertainty. For many people, mathematics communicates a kind of certainty. For example, the equation 2 + 2 = 4 does not vary. But this is not entirely true as mathematics includes many complicated subdisciplines and, the more one learns, the less one knows. There are numerous complicated equations that remain unsolved. Owen’s attraction to complex mathematical theory as an undergraduate, even when he did not always excel at it, suggests someone who enjoys challenging abstract concepts. It also underscores a key theme of the book: that people can feel reasonably certain about many things but still ultimately not know them without any doubt. Tobias’s citation of Albert Einstein, who developed the theory of relativity, encourages Hannah, Bailey, and the reader to recognize the limits of what they cannot know in order to be able to embrace what they do. What matters between people is not what one can really know, or know beyond a shadow of a doubt, but rather what is true for each person. For Tobias, what he knows about Owen is that he was a good kid.
In previous sections, Hannah’s idea of home is based on physical location, but in these chapters, a new version of home emerges. She now associates it with a sense of comfort not connected to any particular place. For Hannah, her shared connection with Owen is a substitute for a physical home. Knowing that Owen lied about himself destroyed her sense of security, but reconstructing details of his past life and confirming that he appears to have lied out of necessity helps safeguard her positive image of Owen. In this unfamiliar place, her belief in his essential goodness helps her find some sense of home while she is very far from the person she considers home. Bailey has not yet developed this more fluid sense of home, so she continues reeling from the information that her father is not who she says he is. Her determination to hunt down more information about Katherine Smith and her connection to the Never Dry suggests that Bailey is still searching for something tangible to ground her, a new non-physical home since she cannot trust her father and the stability he provided her.
