The Last Thing He Told Me

As Hannah sits in the hotel cafe, she replays the US Marshal’s words over and over in her head, unable to shake his assertion Owen may have erased his online footprint to disguise his past. Hannah makes a list of the things she accidentally learned about Owen, recalling the incident when the stranger outside the flea market was certain he knew Owen from Roosevelt High in Texas.

As Hannah remembers the strange night at the hotel bar in San Francisco when the family evacuated the houseboat—the night when she found Owen at the bar with Bailey’s piggy bank—she says, “I realize something about that piggy bank—something I’ve been struggling to remember” (164). Hannah sends Jules a text and asks her to confirm what she has realized.

Amidst the things Hannah accidentally learned about Owen, one story stands out: how he came to love engineering because of a college professor. Hannah wakes Bailey and asks her if she knows the name of the professor, and together they arrive at Tobias Cookman. A quick search shows that Cookman works at UT Austin, not Princeton.