The Last Thing He Told Me

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021

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Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Chapter 4 Summary: “Think What You Want”

Hannah thinks her best friend Jules has come to comfort her, but Jules indicates she is somehow complicit in Owen’s disappearance. Before it is revealed how Jules may be involved, however, Hannah dips into the friends’ past and tells the reader the two met in Peekskill, New York. Hannah’s grandfather moved them from Tennessee to New York when Hannah was a freshman in high school, and Hannah and Jules met while applying for dog-walking jobs. They spent hours walking dogs together and, despite the fact that Jules was the daughter of a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and attended private school, became best friends:

We were so removed from each other’s actual lives that we told each other everything. Jules once compared it to how you confide in a stranger you meet on a plane. From the beginning, this is what we’ve been to each other: safe, airborne (29).

Jules is a photo editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she works with an investigative reporter named Max who has a romantic interest in her.

Jules is a loyal and truthful friend, as evidenced by the memory of her teenaged outrage against Hannah’s two-timing boyfriend, and Hannah can tell that Jules is about to tell her something difficult that will explain why Owen’s disappearance is her fault. Jules says, “When I got to the Chronicle this morning, I knew there was something going on. Max was giddy, which almost always means bad news. Murder, impeachment, Ponzi scheme” (31). What Max knew, and told Jules, was that the federal authorities were going to raid The Store—Avett and Owen’s company—that day. Jules explains that a year earlier, The Store’s IPO was fraudulent and that the innovative software that inflated the stock price and attracted investors was not ready to go to market. To keep the stock price up, Avett falsified the finances, booking possible future sales as earned income to make it appear that the company was hugely profitable while, behind the scenes, the software was being fixed. The timing failed; the SEC was tipped off and discovered the fraud before the software was fixed and the situation was rectified. Jules explains, “And there’s the fraud [...] Max says it’s massive. Stockholders will lose half a billion dollars” (33).

Hannah tries to make sense of this news. She cannot believe Owen would engage in something illegal, but as a senior officer and the company’s chief coder, he would have known that the software was not performing. Jules tells Hannah when she learned of the raid from Max, she called Owen to warn him: ”The thing is, and I can’t believe it myself exactly, but he wasn’t surprised … He wasn’t surprised when I told him about the raid” (35). Owen only wanted to know, Jules says, how long he had to get out. With these bombshells fully deployed, the chapter closes, leaving the reader to wonder how Owen could be anything other than guilty.

Chapter 5 Summary: “Twenty-Four Hours Earlier”

In a brief flashback vignette, Hannah and Owen sat on the dock near their home the day before Owen’s disappearance. They are the picture of marital harmony: sharing Pad Thai, kisses, and easy conversation.

Hannah—whose efforts with Bailey reflect both her desire to make her marriage work and her own empathy for a girl who has lost her mother and is now forced to share her father—told Owen she was going to recreate the birthday dinner Bailey enjoyed at a local restaurant. Owen asked if this is an attempt on Hannah’s part to make Bailey love her, and Hannah retorted that his question was not nice. Owen replied, “I’m trying to be nice [...] Bailey’s lucky to have you. And she’s going to come around to that. Pasta experiment or not” (38). When Hannah asked how Owen could know that, Owen shrugged and replied, “I know things” (38).

Chapter 6 Summary: “Follow the Money”

Just before leaving at 2:00 a.m., Jules asks Hannah whether she has a checking account of her own. Hannah says yes, but does not share with Jules that Owen had insisted that Hannah keep her own checking account. Now Hannah wonders whether this was simply because Owen respected her independence or whether Owen planned to disappear all along. Hannah does not tell Jules about the money in the duffle bag left in Bailey’s school locker, which is stowed under the kitchen sink.

Hannah considers all she has learned since receiving Owen’s note, and admits that it certainly looks as though Owen is guilty of financial crimes and has fled to avoid prosecution. But she does not accept this is the case. She feels she knows Owen well, and believes Owen would never leave Bailey. Furthermore, Hannah thinks she is an extremely good judge of character, explaining, “I’ve spent my life paying incredibly close attention. When my mother left for good, I didn’t see it coming. I missed it. I missed the finality of that departure” (42).

Hannah’s focus returns to Bailey, who is also struggling to make sense of Owen’s departure and the note he left: ”I just keep going over it in my head,” [Bailey] says. “I mean… my father doesn’t make things complicated. At least not with me” (44). The note, coupled with the money, causes Bailey to believe Owen is never coming back, but Hannah refutes this and assures Bailey that her father will return. Hannah’s thoughts return to her own mother’s departure, and the gentle guidance her grandfather provided in the aftermath. She longs for her grandfather’s wisdom now, and doubts her own ability to effectively parent Bailey, asking “What would he say to Bailey now? When am I going to figure out how to say it too?” (46).

Chapters 4-6 Analysis

Chapter 4 highlights Jules, who serves as a foil to Owen in the immediate aftermath of his disappearance. The purpose of the foil in literature is to show the attributes that one character (Owen) is lacking by contrasting that character with another character (Jules). While Owen is missing and unreachable, Jules shows up and remains present, sitting at Hannah’s kitchen table until 2:00 a.m. Where Owen is mysterious and—the reader will discover—untruthful, Jules is reliable and honest, even when it pains her to tell the truth. And while Owen has only been in Hannah’s life two years, Jules has been around since Hannah was 15—a steadfast presence who, during difficult times in Hannah’s life, is consistent, empathetic, and supportive.

As Jules explains to Hannah what she knows about Owen’s company and the fraud taking place there, the contrast between Jules and Owen is readily apparent. Owen has hidden his financial and business troubles from his wife, but Jules shares everything she knows with Hannah, including the source of her information about the federal raid on Owen’s company and the actions she took, leading her to think Owen’s disappearance is her fault.

The purpose of Jules as a foil lies in the distrust it creates in the reader’s evaluation of Owen. As more information comes to light, the reader increasingly doubts Owen has been truthful with Hannah. Because the reader closely identifies with Hannah (thanks, in large part, to the novel’s first-person point of view and conversational tone), the betrayal lurking in the shadows seems personal to the reader. The level of tension rises, and the reader—sympathetic to and protective of Hannah—braces for the discoveries that are sure to follow.

During the exchange on the dock in Chapter 5, Owen tells Hannah that he knows Bailey will come around because he “know[s] things” (38). While Hannah took this statement as a joke at the time, the reader understands this was an understatement on Owen’s part. Owen knows all sorts of things—about himself, about Bailey, about the financial fraud taking place at his company—he has not shared with Hannah. Thus, this seemingly innocuous statement, said in the midst of an otherwise tender scene between husband and wife, is loaded for the reader and increases the reader’s inclination to doubt Owen.

A few minutes later in the same scene, Hannah asks Owen what the favorite part of his day was. This question—a familiar shorthand exchange between a married couple—prompts Hannah to guess that Owen will say his favorite part was when Hannah shared her blanket with him. Owen replies, ”Shows how well you know me” (39). Again, this is an innocent statement at face value, but the reader knows too much at this point to accept it that way. This simple piece of dialogue functions to heighten the tension in the story, because the reader is beginning to suspect that Hannah, despite what she believes, does not know Owen at all and will soon come to that painful realization. Furthermore, the pasta dinner Hannah tells Owen she will make for Bailey the next day is the same pasta dinner burnt at the end of Chapter 2, providing the reader with a time stamp that helps the reader stay oriented as the story moves between the present and the past.

When the reader learns Hannah has not told Jules about the duffle bag of money under the sink or the fact that it was at Owen’s insistence that she kept her own checking account, it becomes clear that Hannah’s primary loyalty is to Owen, despite the fact that it is Jules—her longtime best friend—who is truthful and honest. Hannah’s two omissions point to a second dilemma playing out in the novel: Hannah’s refusal to believe Owen would have abandoned Bailey unless he had no other choice.

The reader might be tempted to ascribe Hannah’s belief in Owen to the natural loyalty of a wife or to Hannah’s personal inability to accept that she is actually a poor judge of character, but Hannah asks herself the same questions the reader is asking: “He would never leave Bailey unless he absolutely had to. How can I be so sure of this? How can I trust myself to be sure of anything when I’m obviously biased in what I’m willing to see?” (42). She explains that the trauma of her mother’s departure caused her to develop keen skills of observation: ”That’s the part that I missed: My mother didn’t care enough not to be lost to me. That’s the part I’ve sworn to myself I would never miss again” (43). The reader empathizes with Hannah’s vulnerability while concurrently wondering if Hannah is overestimating both her own insights and Owen’s character. The question of whether Hannah is an accurate observer of human nature or saddled with hubris further heightens the tension in the story. Will Hannah’s belief in Owen, which contradicts the evidence, be vindicated? Or will her confidence in her own abilities of discernment prove to be her downfall?

Hannah struggles to deal with Bailey, who rejects Hannah’s acts of kindness and sympathy. The stepmother-stepchild relationship is a literary trope most readers see in childhood stories such as Cinderella or Hansel and Gretel, but Hannah plays against trope: She is not wicked or mean-spirited, but overaccommodating in her efforts with Bailey. The relationship between Hannah and Bailey is a subplot used to engage the reader on a level below the surface of the main plot. This subplot increases the tension in the novel as the reader wonders whether Hannah and Bailey will become allies or outright enemies.