i'm feeling conflicted after reading The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave

Read Rant Review

Kayleigh reviews Laura Dave's mystery novel, The Last Thing He Told Me, following the disappearance of Owen Michaels. The narrative tracks H

Key takeaways

• Owen Michaels leaves a cryptic note for his wife, Hannah, saying 'Protect her,' referring to his daughter Bailey.
• The disappearance is linked to an SEC and FBI investigation into a software startup known as 'the shop' and its CEO, Avett Thompson.

Main topics

• Book Review
• Mystery and Suspense

Notable quotes

Protect her.

Conclusion

An emotionally resonant mystery that explores the complexities of mate

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hey, thank you so much for clicking on this video. My name is Kayleigh and this is a Read Rant Review where... You guessed it. I read a bunch of crazy, crazy books and then I tell you all about them. Today, I'm going to be telling you guys about a very popular book with its own TV show, potentially getting approved for season three. The book is called The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave. This book was published in 2021, 300 pages, and currently on Goodreads. It's sitting at over 1.2 million ratings. And like I said, it has its own Apple TV show that just finished its second season earlier this year. There's also a second book that came out a couple of months ago. So I want to know what all the hype is about. I haven't read it, haven't seen the TV show. I have no idea what I'm getting into. It's just very popular and was trending and so we're going to read book one. I bought book two because it was on sale, not realizing it was book two. I did the same thing with The Perfect Marriage and Perfect Divorce and then I got forced into reading both. This might be a similar situation. So anyway, before Owen Michaels disappears, he smuggles a note to his beloved wife of one year. Protect her. Despite her confusion and fear, Hannah Hall knows exactly to whom the note refers. Owen's 16-year-old daughter, Bailey. Bailey, who lost her mother tragically as a child. Bailey, who wants absolutely nothing to do with her new stepmother. As Hannah's increasingly desperate calls to Owen go unanswered, as the FBI arrests Owen's boss and U.S. Marshal and federal agents arrive at her Sosalito, Speaker 1 (1:41) It's over in the San Francisco area. I don't know. In her Sausalito home, unannounced, Hannah quickly realizes her husband isn't who he said he was, and that Bailey just may hold the key to figuring out Owen's true identity and why he really disappeared. Hannah and Bailey set out to discover the truth, but as they start putting together the pieces of Owen's past, they soon realize they're also building a new future, one neither of them could have anticipated. usual content warnings for the video. Viewer discretion is advised. Dip if you gotta dip or if it's too heavy or whatever or if you want to go and read this and then come back and do this as a book club discussion. I don't know. Whatever floats your boat. Really, I just have two main things on the channel. This review is not for the author. It's not for friends, fans, family, stans, anything of the like. I don't know if I'm gonna like this book. Maybe I will. Maybe I won't. We'll find out together. but I have one rule and one rule only on the channel. Say it with me if you know what it is. Don't make it weird, okay? Quite literally all I ask of you people. And then the final thing, just like a little shout out, my second channel is called Don't Make It Weird where I read scary Reddit stories. So please go check that out. And then also all of these episodes and the episodes. videos, whatever, from my other channel are both up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. So if you prefer listening over there, you have all those options. Let's get into the book. a prologue to Hannah telling us about her relationship with her husband of one year, Owen, and how they met and how their first date went and how he would tease her all the time for being so incredibly forgetful and how on their very first date, she ended up losing the like parking ticket for the garage. So they ended up having to pay like this hundred dollar fee because they didn't have proof that they were only there for an hour, yada, yada. He teased her about it and about losing it. And it was just a whole thing. And then, the week after Owen disappeared, I had a dream of him standing in that parking lot. He was wearing the same suit, the same charmed smile. In the dream, he was taking off his wedding ring. Look, Hannah, he said, now you've lost me too. So we go into part one of the book, and part one opens with a quote from Albert Einstein. I have little patience with scientists who take a board of wood, look for its thinnest part, and drill a great number of holes where drilling is easy. This is also relevant because Hannah is a woodturner, I think is the term that she uses. That's the profession which I'd never heard of before. And then interestingly, each of the chapters, they are not numbered, but rather they are named. So this first chapter is titled, If You Answer the Door for Strangers. Can you imagine what Hannah does in the first chapter of this book? She gets a mysterious knock on the door. from a stranger. She opens the door and it is this like, I don't know, elementary school aged girl that has a note and she says, hey, I don't know, Owen gave me 20 bucks and told me to give this to you. I guess his like cell phone's broken or something. Okay, it's kind of weird. Little girl has absolutely no relation to this family. It's not friends of the teenage daughter. It's just some random kid. So Hannah's like, why in the hell is he involving this little child? What is happening right now? But she opens the note. And the only thing that the note says is protect her, which is, as we learned in the book description, definitely referring to his 16-year-old daughter, Bailey. In chapter two, the title is Green Street Before It Was Green Street. And we get some background information about how Oa and Harrow, how Hannah and Owen met. We also get some background about her where she's thinking about her childhood and her career and all of this information. So Hannah had two parents, ended up kind of like abandoning her with her grandfather and he was left to raise her on his own, raised her in his footsteps. That's why she became a wood turner or a wood worker, just like her grandfather was. And then she was in New York City. She was living in Manhattan doing this woodworking stuff and one of her pieces ended up getting featured in like Architect's Digest. Became a big thing. It was this like fluke of luck situation where she just ended up hitting it big. And that's how she met Owen. Owen and his boss ended up coming out there to look at some furniture. Owen was like, dang, okay, look at this pretty little lady. Let me try to go on a date with her. She initially said no. But then as he was leaving, she like uncharacteristically, she's like, hey, yeah, let's go on a date. Go on a date. I think they've known each other for like two years and then they've been married for a year. And then we also get information about because of her like rougher childhood and her like more difficult relationship with her mother, she's had a difficult time stepping in in like a motherly stepmother role for Bailey. Does not help the fact that Bailey is 16 years old. So she would have come into her life in her like teenage years. Horrible time to be introduced to a new parental figure, in my humble opinion. So it's been very complicated between the two of them. Very difficult, but there's no resentment there. It is just this like desperate desire of Hannah's for Bailey to like her. and want to hang out with her and be close to her. And it's this really like driving personality thing is what I'm picking up so far. To the point that anything she does, anything she does at all, gets heavily criticized by Bailey. For example, she went to pick her up from school one day and she was five minutes late. Not 10 minutes, five. It was 5.05 p.m. That's what the clock said when I pulled up to her friend's house. But it may as well have been an hour. Bailey is an exacting girl. Owen will tell you this is a quality that we have in common. Both his wife and his daughter can decipher everyone about someone else in five minutes. That's all it takes. And in the five minutes Bailey was making her decision about me and I was on a telephone call, I shouldn't have taken. Yikes. It was with a client. It wasn't anything dramatic. It was just like, she should have, I guess, picked choosing the daughter over the... client or whatever. So yeah, and then this paragraph that I've highlighted, and I do want her to move toward me, like to be close to me. I want us to have a relationship, and not just because of Owen. It's more than that. What draws me toward Bailey, even as she pushes me away. Part of it is that I recognize in her that things happen when you lose your mother. My mother left by choice, Bailey's by tragedy, but it leaves a similar imprint on you either way. It leaves you in the same strange place trying to figure out how to navigate the world without the most important person watching. Chapter three is called Don't Ask a Question You Don't Want the Answer To. And in this chapter, Owen has still not called. It's now 8 p.m. It has been... 12 hours since she has last seen Owen and two hours since this mysterious little girl dropped off this note. Still no sign of him. So she goes to pick up Bailey from practice, I think, or wherever the heck she is. Goes to pick her up from school. And as she's waiting in the parking lot for her to come out, she turns on the radio. And on the radio, there is an announcement. Today's raid was the culmination of a 14-month investigation by the SC... SEC and the FBI into the software startup's business practices. We can confirm that the shop's CEO, Avett Thompson, is in custody. Expected charges include embezzlement and fraud. Sources close to the investigation... Sources and close to the... Sources close to the investigation have told NPR that, quote, there's evidence Thompson planned to flee the country and had set up a residence in Dubai. Other indictments of senior staff are expected to be handed down shortly. The shop. She's talking about the shop, which is the startup where Owen works. How is it possible? Owen is honored to work there. Owen used that word. honored. He told me that he took a salary cut to join them early on and nearly everyone there had taken a salary cut, leaving bigger companies behind. Google, Facebook, Twitter, leaving big money behind agreeing to stock options in lieu of traditional compensation. Didn't Owen tell me they did this because they believed in the technology that the shop was developing? They aren't Enron or Theranos. They're a software company. They were building software tools set to privatize online life, helping people control what was made available about them, providing child easy ways to erase an embarrassing image, make a website all but disappear. They wanted to be part of revolutionizing online privacy. They wanted to make a positive difference. How could there be fraud in that? Okay, so she just keeps thinking of that weird mystery note. Protect her, protect her, protect her. Okay, as she's thinking this, Bailey comes out of the school. she seems a little flustered. There's definitely something wrong. And so when she gets in the car, she has a duffel bag with her. She didn't have that duffel bag earlier today. So Hannah says, hey, you good? What's up? What's going on? She says, open it up see what's up she opens it bills on bills on bills on bills of rolled just rolled loose money in this duffel bag it is from her dad inside of this duffel bag that was left in her locker there is a note that says bailey i can't help this make sense i'm sorry you know what matters about me and you know what matters about yourself please hold on to it help hannah Do what she tells you. She loves you. We both do. You are my whole life. They end up taking out the money and counting it. $600,000 in this duffel bag. And that's it. They got two notes and a big old duffel bag of money. And dad is off doing God knows what. They're at the house. Both of them now like just kind of sitting in the car thinking like, what the hell do you do, right? car comes up the road. At first she's like, oh my god, this is Owen, this is gonna be great. And then her second thought is, oh my god, this is probably the police, this is not great. Turns out it's a secret third better thing. It is her best friend Jules, her like long-term best friend she's ever had. And yeah, I'm saying a lot of names, don't worry. Hey, if you're new here, I put names up on the screen so everybody can follow along with what's happening. So her best friend Jules is the one that's driving up the driveway, turns out. She comes up, she gives him a hug. Bailey also loves Jules. So this is good. This is a good comforting presence, right? To be here in this moment. But it's not as comforting as it should be because Jules says, it's all my fault. What? In chapter four, which is titled, Think What You Want, we find out that Jules works at San Francisco Chronicle. She's a photo editor there. And so that morning when she went to work, her boss was very excited. which is never good because if he's excited, that means that there is something crazy going on, right? Like murder, impeachment, Ponzi scheme, like something crazy is making this guy excited. So she ended up getting the scoop ahead of time about the SEC looking into the company and how they were going to raid it later and like get all these people. We get a little bit more information about what had happened. And also we get more information because when she called Owen and gave him a heads up, he wasn't surprised about what was going on, right? They were going to go public, ended up they didn't have the funding or something. So the lead guy was lying about the money. He was like showing revenue, but it was based off of like future anticipated sales. And so that way they could like sell the stock and get the money ahead of time. But the SEC ended up getting tipped off beforehand. So they ended up getting caught lying about the funding. even though maybe it probably would have been okay in a couple of months or whatever. To be honest, I don't know. I don't know much about that stuff. He's just lying to shareholders and the shareholders would lose like a half a billion dollars because of these lies. And so that's why this is such a huge deal. So Jules called ahead of time and gave Owen a heads up as like a friend. Wasn't surprised at all. The only thing he asked was how much time do I have? Good God. So who is this guy right now? She's starting to question everything Hannah is. Like, how do you not, right? He looks guilty as hell. I don't know, man. In chapter five, titled 24 Hours Earlier, it is exactly that. We are just getting information about the last time that Hannah and Owen hung out. They went on a date. They were eating pad thai on the dock and just talking about life. The perfect, you know, picture of marital bliss. There's nothing really indicating that anything is wrong. Other than her talking about wanting to... throw Bailey this birthday party at a restaurant or something to try to like again further their relationship and he makes a comment about how Bailey is lucky to have her and she's gonna come around to that. Hannah's like how would you even know that and he makes this ominous comment of I know things. I mean I guess it could be ominous given the where we are now but not really you know so okay odd. I wonder if this is gonna come back around in some way. Chapter six is called follow the money. Jules finally leaves the house around 2 a.m. after asking Hannah if she has her own checking account. She does, but she does not tell Jules that this is because of, like, the insistence from Owen. And she's starting to wonder if he wanted her to have her own checking account for this exact reason, or if it was just her, him wanting her to have her own financial independence, you know? Like, now we're, like, questioning every motive that this man has ever had. Also, obviously does not tell Jules about the money under the sink, right? The $600,000 duffel bag thing, they threw it under the kitchen sink. I feel like there could be better hiding places, but sure, sure, sure, sure, that's fine. Doesn't tell her about this. And then she just can't believe that he's leaving, right? She's like, he has to come back. Like, I'm a good judge of character. I missed it when my mom left me for good. And I've been paying attention ever since then. Like, I didn't want anybody to ever like catch me off guard after that. this doesn't make sense. This isn't the man that I know. Like there's, there's more to this. He's got to be coming back. Bailey, however, looking at this note from her dad and everything that he's ever told her and treated her and everything, like he's always been so straightforward with her that based off of this note, it sounds like he's not ever coming back. And I don't think he is. Like, I believe what my dad says. And according to this, he's gone. She can't comfort her. There's no comfort that anybody can give each other right now, right? There's high emotion and stress and misunderstanding and whatever across the board. And it's just, what do you do, right? Other than just suffer together. Okay, honestly, maybe this is turning out to be really good. So the next chapter is chapter seven. It's called Help is on the Way. And Hannah is just outside taking out the trash. And this random guy walks up to her with like these cups of coffee. And he says, Hannah, I take it. It's nice to meet you. Who the hell are you? I'm Grady. Grady Bradford. You can call me Grady or Deputy Bradford if you prefer, though that seems awfully formal for our purposes. He is a U.S. marshal that has showed up, shows his badge, shows his badge number if she wants to call and verify who he is. Primarily, I apprehend people who are defrauding the U.S. government. You think my husband's done that? I think the shop has done that, but no. I'm not convinced your husband has, though I'd need to speak to him before I could properly assess his involvement. Seems like he doesn't want to have that conversation, though. So he talks to her a little bit, and he's asking, you know, like, have you seen him? Have you talked to him at all? You know, we see he hasn't used his credit cards or anything, or we haven't picked him up anywhere, so we should probably stop calling him, because he's probably dumped his phone somewhere. And also... you should probably get a lawyer because until he returns to answer all of these questions, you're going to have a lot of people stopping by and asking you stuff and they're not your friends. Like you need to be protective of yourself. And she says, okay, but doesn't that apply to you too? He says, yeah. And it's a little bantery. Like I really, I can't get a good read on this guy at all, which is kind of the whole point. But he ends this conversation with her. by saying that he made a phone call for you this morning to Thomas Shelton. He's an old buddy of mine who works on law, family law for the state of California. I just wanted to make sure you're protected in case someone comes out of the woodwork seeking temporary custody of Bailey during all of this. He'll pull some strings to make sure that the temporary custody is granted to you because she's technically not Bailey's like guardian, I guess, or you know what I mean? Like she didn't formally adopt her or anything. And so Hannah is like, okay, so why, why, why would you do that for us? Like, is that even in his jurisdiction? Like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And Grady says, yeah, and I did it so you would trust me when I tell you that the best thing you can do for Owen is lie low and get a lawyer. Do you know one? She says, yeah, I do. He says, okay, lie low, call your lawyer, mind your business. And then he goes on to say like, if Owen does call you or come back, like have him reach out to me, I can help him. I can help you too. Wait, with which part? With which part what? Can you help? The easy part, getting through this. What's the hard part? Owen's not who you think he is. And then Grady Bradford is gone. Okay, so she's at home. She grabs Owen's work laptop and she goes to his lawyer friend's house. Dude is named Carl. That was Owen's first friend that he made when he moved to Sausalito. And I don't know, the guy kind of sucks. It's a whole thing, but they are like loyal to each other. And so she's like, maybe he can help me. But this guy and his wife got screwed out of like... a whole bunch of money because Owen convinced them to invest in the company. So as far as they're concerned, he can go and f*** himself. He broke Carl's heart. He like completely used him as a friend. So they're like, get off my lawn. I don't care if you think you don't know anything. Like, we're not going to help you. Go home. Hannah goes to her workshop, right? Her woodworking shop that she has to go through this laptop. And as she's going through it, she's looking through like the photos and all these things. And she ends up finding pictures of Owen's first wife, Bailey's mother. Bailey's mother looks like her, like the both of the wives look the same. But the child does not look like the mom. I hope that makes sense. So, okay, that's kind of an odd thing to drop. Is the daughter not really like biologically this woman's daughter? Does he have a type? Like why are you saying this to me, right? Like as a reader, I'm like what am I supposed to be picking up from this conversation? I don't know yet. So we have this little piece of information. We also have the fact that she finds a folder for his work stuff and inside of the work stuff folder there is his will. This is a little alarming considering he just disappeared. So she opens it and she's like, oh, okay. He had showed this to me right after we got married and it doesn't look like anything has changed since then. Except above his signature, it names his conservator, someone I've never heard of, L. Paul. No address, no phone number. L. Paul, who is this person? And where have I seen his or her name before? I'm making a note about them in my notebook when I hear a female voice behind me. And it's two FBI agents. And these FBI agents are in here and they say, hey, same questions as the U.S. Marshal earlier. They're like, hey, what do you know about where your husband is? Have you seen him? You don't seem very angry. Like, it's kind of weird. You're really going to tell me that the wife, you have no idea where he is? And she says, yes, I really don't. And they say, okay, well, what about the Thompsons, right? Avett Thompson, who's the owner of the company, who... bought like $150,000 of her woodworking that she's been doing. What about them? That's a pretty big client of yours. You don't know anything about them? Have you spoken to them, to Avid or to his wife, Belle? She says no, even though she's called them. She's called Belle like six times trying to get ahold of her to be like, WTF are our husbands doing? But the messages were left unreturned. And the FBI agent leans in and she says, We just want to make sure you're telling us everything as opposed to your friend Belle. What do you mean? Let's just say it didn't help her proclamation of innocence that she made it after purchasing four flights to Sydney from different Northern California airports in an attempt to leave the country undetected. It doesn't scream, I know nothing, does it? Speaker 1 (22:50) So then she's like, how would this woman know this? Like, I feel so stupid. I feel so in the dark about everything. What could possibly be happening? And then they go on to say, okay, well, hey, if you don't know anything and you're not going to answer it, we're going to go and interview Bailey. She says, the fuck you are. You're not talking to that child. Like, you have no business talking to her. She doesn't know anything. They say, well, you don't really have any control over that. She says, I do. Actually, I have a lawyer. We've retained legal counsel. And if you want to talk to her, you have to go through them. Okay, and who's your lawyer? I say it before I let myself consider the implication of saying it. Jake Anderson. Oh my god. It just started storming like crazy. Speaker 1 (23:35) Oh no. I say it before I let myself consider the implication of saying it. Jake Anderson. He's based in New York. That is her ex-fiance. Okay, we're going to unpack it in a minute. That's her ex-fiance. And then she counters back and she's like, hey guys, got it. I know you're doing your jobs, but I literally already got grilled this morning by a U.S. Marshal. So like, I need you to get gone. And the FBI agents, they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What do you mean? You talked to a U.S. Marshal? She says, yeah, he already came by. He already asked all these questions. They said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What's his name? Because this is not in his jurisdiction and you should not be answering questions from him. Like you should have a lawyer and you shouldn't just be answering random questions from people who claim to be a part of the government when they come and talk to you. And she says, you know what? Mysterious FBI agents, you're so right. I'm gonna start that right now. You should go ahead and leave. You can talk to my lawyer. Okay, so I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I'm at the 22 % mark. Oh, let me read a little bit. I'll come back. I had to finish reading the book. It's so good. Speaker 1 (24:46) Let me collect myself so I can finish telling you how I got here. I just had to acknowledge that part because I think I'm gonna have to leave in a minute and I'm not gonna be able to finish telling you this until later and you needed to see my like, my reaction as I just turned off this. I just closed my app. god. So after this encounter with the FBI agents and the flop of an encounter with the friend Carl, she goes home and on the way home she makes a call to the guy Jake. Again, this is her ex-fiance from back in New York who is like a lawyer and he's always expected this call back from her. Not that he's a douche, but he's kind of a douche and he had always said that he was like waiting for this phone call and for her to like come crawling back to him type of thing, but she Clears it up immediately. She's like, no, I'm not getting a divorce, but my husband's in trouble and blah, blah, blah. I need your help here. And so he, you know, gives some general advice and stuff and goes on to say, first of all, don't be too worried that the FBI didn't know about the. guy from the U.S. Marshal Service coming to talk to you. They could all be lying to you. And beyond that, there are often turf wars between different law enforcement agencies, especially when the scope of the investigation is still in question. Any word yet from anyone from the SEC? No, there will be. You should refer all law enforcement to me, at least until we know what's going on. Just don't say anything. Have them call me directly. So then the question becomes, okay, So why is he doing this? Why did he run? And she thinks and tells Jake that it has to be because of Bailey to protect her daughter. He would literally do anything for his daughter. Like, that's the only explanation. And he kind of counters this. And he's like, hey, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. If he wasn't running from doing something illegal at the shop, he's probably running from what the shop might reveal about him. The question is what that could be. I have a private investigator, a good one. I'll ask him to do some digging, but I'm going to need you to email me Owen's entire history. Anything you know, where he went to school, where he grew up, and dates, everything. And also where and when his daughter was born. Just give me what you got. And our next chapter, it's titled Six Weeks Ago, and this is a flashback to a late night conversation that Hannah and Owen were having in bed where he was just kind of acting f***ed. funky in saying how he needed a vacation, like he needed some time off, and that we should go to New Mexico. I haven't been there in a long time. Last time I went there, I drove there in college. And she's like, you drove all the way from New Jersey to New Mexico? I don't know. It was a mountain somewhere. Maybe it was Vermont. All I remember is that the air was too thin. And she's like, what is going on with you? He's just like, I just, I really need that vacation. Okay. I don't even know what that could possibly mean. The next chapter is called Bailey's No Good, Very Bad Day. And she comes home from school. And obviously, dude, you know how high schoolers are. It's all over the news about her dad's company and everybody talking crap about like her life and, you know, just rumor mill stuff, right? Hannah kind of goes out on a limb here and she's like, hey. I'm really, I'm thinking a lot about these things that your dad said, right? What you asked me what I thought your dad meant in the letter he left you when he said that you know what matters. Like, maybe it wasn't about him loving you like we thought or like I said it was. Maybe it meant something else. Like, maybe he wrote you that because you know something. You know something about him that he wants you to remember. And she's like, what could that possibly be? And she's like, I don't know. We just, ah, right? So begins this like deep dive where they're going to try to unpack her memories because she doesn't really remember anything about her past life. Like when they moved to California when she was like five years old, I want to say, like she was pretty young. She doesn't really remember her life before that. She barely remembers her mom. It's just, there's a lot of mystery about her life pre-California and they're going to try to unpack this. And at some point, Hannah trying to like read between the lines of everything, she's remembering a comment from Grady and how he gave her her phone number and the area code was 512. Well, that's not an area code anywhere in California. And so she looks it up and it's an area code for Austin, Texas. So she looks up the number and it's the number for the Western Texas branch of the U.S. Marshals. So why? is a marshal from Texas flying out to California for this case and just ending up on her doorstep. Like, this is really weird. Especially a marshal who, if I believe what the FBI agent said, have no authorization over the investigation. And if he does have authorization, why? What has Owen done that Bradford would somehow, or Grady, would be so somehow involved in? What does Texas have to do with any of this? And so she looks over at Bailey and she says, Bailey, have you ever been? to Texas? Like, I really need you to think about it for a second. Like, have you ever been to Austin, Texas or, or anything like that? And she's like, I mean, maybe I, when I was. I might have been there for a wedding when I