Hannah and Bailey travel to Austin to investigate turns a stray telephone number into a physical search through a city, a stadium, and a church. The journey gives Bailey’s uncertain childhood recollections places and records against which to test themselves, but it does not make memory immediately reliable: the evidence they find complicates her account even as the trip eventually prompts her to remember being called Kristin.

The Austin clue

Bailey’s recollection first surfaces while Hannah is trying to make sense of Owen’s absence. She remembers that Grady Bradford offered his own number and the number of his branch office, whose area code was unfamiliar to Hannah. Now Hannah takes out Fred’s napkin with Grady’s contact details and sees that both numbers begin with 512. She calls the office number; the automatic operator identifies it as a United States Marshals Service office. Hannah establishes that it is the western Texas branch in Austin. The number points to a place, but it also raises a question: why would a marshal working from Texas appear in the investigation around Owen?

Hannah asks Bailey whether she and her father ever spent time in Austin. Bailey pauses and reaches for a possible memory rather than a confident answer. She thinks she may have been there for a wedding when she was very young, perhaps as a flower girl, and recalls being made to pose for photographs. Someone, she thinks, told her they were in Austin. Her account offers a lead, not confirmation: the details arrive with qualifications, and the city is not yet independently established as the scene of the wedding.

Hannah decides the possibility is enough to act on. She tells Bailey to pack, explaining that the wedding recollection has changed her mind about where they should go. The investigation thus begins not with a verified destination in Owen’s history, but with two clues that might intersect: Grady Bradford’s Austin office and Bailey’s hazy memory of a wedding there.

Testing the memory in the city

They leave on a 6:55 a.m. flight from San Jose. By then, forty-six hours have passed since Owen left for work, and Hannah has heard nothing from him. In Austin, the search becomes a deliberate attempt to let the surroundings prompt Bailey’s recollection. At two thirty, Hannah chooses to walk back toward Congress Avenue Bridge rather than take a faster route. She hopes that moving through the city might jog Bailey’s memory, while recognizing that there may be no memory to retrieve.

The walk takes them through downtown and toward the campus and Darrell K Royal Stadium. The city’s busy streets and the enormous stadium give the search a tangible geography; they are not simply asking Bailey to remember in the abstract, but placing her among locations that might be familiar. Bailey initially keeps her eyes on her phone. At a traffic light on Fifth Street, she looks up, but familiarity does not resolve into a clear account.

At the stadium, Bailey recalls being there in the afternoon in her flower-girl dress, perhaps after the wedding ceremony. Even as she describes the scene, she wonders whether she is imagining it. Hannah sees her frustration and recognizes the limits of the method: Bailey may already have remembered everything she could in Sausalito, and the walk cannot guarantee that a missing memory will return. Bailey’s uncertainty remains explicit. The feeling that a stadium might be familiar is not, by itself, a reliable identification.

The church and the calendar

The search narrows to a church. Hannah and Bailey have walked into six possible churches; an Episcopal church in Austin is the only one Bailey says feels familiar. It is more than a century old and lies just over half a mile from the football stadium. Bailey’s response gives the place special weight in their investigation, but the feeling of recognition still needs a testable connection to the wedding.

They ask Elenor H. McGovern, who works in the church office, for a list of weddings held there during the 2008 football season. Hannah has already prepared a chart of the Longhorns’ schedule from twelve years earlier. Jules cross-checked it at the San Francisco Chronicle, leaving eight possible dates. The list is designed to reduce the search to occasions when Bailey could have attended a game with Owen and then been at the church. The dates make the question concrete, but they cannot establish that the wedding took place there.

The records deliver a sharp contradiction. The church had closed in the fall of 2008 for a major renovation after a fire. Its doors shut on September 1, and services and ceremonies did not resume until March; there were no weddings during the period Hannah and Bailey are checking. Elenor brings up the calendar so they can see its empty squares for themselves. Bailey insists that the year had to be 2008 and that the season mattered if her mother had been with them. Elenor offers 2007 as another possibility, but Bailey believes she would have been too young to remember it. The archive does not confirm the memory; it makes Bailey confront the possibility that her remembered date and the documented calendar cannot both be right.

A remembered name

The trip’s movement through places and records does not immediately settle Bailey’s past. The church’s closure leaves the wedding clue unresolved, while Bailey’s account continues to waver between remembered details and the fear that she has imagined them. Later, when Hannah asks Charlie Smith whether he knows Owen, Bailey recalls hearing herself called Kristin. She says that she remembers the name being used for her and is startled by the fact that she had forgotten it.

Hannah answers that people forget things when no one helps them remember. In the context of the Austin search, the response gives the journey a consequence beyond finding a wedding venue. Bailey’s recollection has been approached through questions, photographs associated with the possible wedding, and the experience of places that seem familiar; the book preserves the uncertainty around how much each prompt can prove. Yet the name Kristin arrives as a distinct recollection, not as a resolution supplied by the church records.

Significance of the investigation

Austin functions as both a lead in Hannah’s search for Owen and a testing ground for Bailey’s fragmented childhood memory. The 512 area code leads to Grady Bradford’s office, while Bailey’s hesitant flower-girl recollection leads Hannah toward the stadium and a church. Each step changes the form of the evidence: a telephone number identifies an office, a felt recognition selects one church from six, and an archival calendar challenges the year Bailey believes she remembers.

The investigation therefore advances through uncertainty rather than a clean chain of confirmations. Hannah acts on clues that are plausible but incomplete; Bailey supplies memories while openly doubting them; and the church’s empty calendar prevents familiarity from becoming proof. The later recovery of the name Kristin gives the search a personal revelation, but it does not erase the contradictions encountered along the way. Austin matters because it makes the past newly accessible while showing how difficult it is to distinguish remembered experience from what questions and surroundings help bring back.