The Last Thing He Told Me

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021

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Chapters 22-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2

Chapter 22 Summary: “Delete All History”

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.

Chapter 23 Summary: “It’s Science, Isn’t It?”

Excited by the discovery of Professor Tobias Cookman so close by, Bailey and Hannah jump in a cab and head to the UT campus, where they find Cookman’s office manned by a graduate assistant. Hannah smoothly manufactures a lie to explain why she and Bailey need to sit in on Cookman’s class, and the two enter the classroom of the professor.

Cookman, a gruff and demanding character, says he cannot help with identifying a student he had 25 years earlier. But when Hannah reminds him Owen was the worst student he ever had, and Bailey appeals to him to help find her father, Cookman softens. He asks Bailey what her father has done, and Bailey tells the professor that her father lied to her. In response, “He nods, like that is enough for him [...] ‘Come with me,’ he says” (176).

Chapter 24 Summary: “Some Students Are Better Than Others”

Back in his office, Professor Cookman has his graduate assistants help comb through records to find Owen. Looking at the photo Bailey has provided, Cookman explains, “You don’t remember all of [the students], but I do remember him...Though I remember him having longer hair. And being much heavier. He looks quite different” (178).

When the graduate assistants return with the class rosters from Owen’s year, there are 50 men through which to be sorted. Since Hannah and Bailey do not know the name Owen used at that time, they begin to despair of ever finding him, but Cookman offers something helpful. He recalls when Owen failed his midterm—the same midterm Cookman framed and hung up to scare his other students—Owen blamed it on being distracted by the girl with whom he was in love, also in the class. The roster has no one named Olivia, but Hannah and Bailey leave Cookman’s office hopeful they are on the right path.

Chapters 22-24 Analysis

The piggy bank Hannah recalls in Chapter 22 will prove critical to her decision-making process, but at the moment, the reader does not know how the piggy bank will be significant.

Professor Tobias Cookman is the first tangible lead Hannah has had on the path to finding out who Owen really is. Just as “the stepmother” is a trope, so is the “curmudgeonly professor,” who appears in works such as George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (Professor Henry Higgins) and C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe (Professor Kirke). Professor Cookman is the stereotypical male professor whose classroom antics strike fear in his students. As Hannah and Bailey observe his class, Hannah notes, “[h]e only calls on students who aren’t raising their hands. When they know the answer, Cookman looks away, no acknowledgment. When a student doesn’t know the answer, he keeps his eyes on the offender” (172). Yet, when Hannah reminds Cookman he once framed Owen’s midterm in order to shame him, and Bailey appeals to him to help find her father, Cookman softens and agrees to help, saying he framed the midterm to “prove his authority” (175) and now regrets having done that.

The interaction with Cookman foreshadows Hannah’s coming encounter with Nicholas Bell, Owen’s former father-in-law. Although she does not yet know it, Bell with be the same sort of person: a man once destructive in his quest for power, but who has been tempered by time and circumstances to realize people are more important than power.

When Cookman describes how Owen looked as a student, it also foreshadows what Owen’s appearance will be at the end of the book—different, but not entirely unrecognizable to the people who know and love him.