Hannah and Bailey follow a UT Austin lead and obtain a class roster

Hannah Hall and Bailey Michaels pursue a clue hidden in Owen Michaels’s memories, converting stories he once shared in confidence into a practical route toward the University of Texas at Austin. The search produces a spring 1995 mathematics-class roster: not yet proof of Owen’s real identity, but the first tangible list from which to look for it. Its importance lies in the contrast between the polished biography Owen supplied and the personal details he disclosed without realizing they might one day lead back to him.

From Suspicion to a Searchable Clue

As reports about The Shop fill the hotel televisions, Hannah sees Avett Thompson being led away in handcuffs, hears Belle Thompson describe his arrest as a travesty of justice, and watches news captions warn that more indictments are coming. The coverage echoes Grady Bradford’s warning and sharpens Hannah’s fear that whatever Owen is running from may reach the family. She turns to her notepad, reviewing what Grady told her, including his suggestion that Owen might have erased his online history. Rather than treating a missing digital record as the only way forward, she asks what Owen revealed in person, especially in moments of intimacy when he did not seem to be constructing an official account of himself.

Hannah separates the biography she already suspects is false from the less deliberate details she remembers. Newton, Princeton, and Seattle belong to the claims she cannot trust; the anecdotes Owen told late at night may preserve a different kind of evidence. One recollection concerns a man from Roosevelt High School. A search turns up eighty-six schools with that name across the United States. None is near Massachusetts, but eight are in Texas, including locations around San Antonio and Dallas. The search does not establish Owen’s identity, yet it changes the geography of the investigation: Texas becomes a plausible place to test his past.

Other memories give Hannah more specific leads. Owen had described taking a boat trip down the Eastern Seaboard with his father at nearly sixteen, the only time he spent several days alone with him. He had recalled losing his first job after letting his girlfriend’s dog out; when it ran away, he spent the afternoon searching rather than returning to work. He had also described sneaking into a midnight screening of Star Wars and arriving home at 2:45 a.m., with his parents still awake. These stories are not independently verified in this episode, but Hannah treats their particulars as potentially more revealing than the false credentials she already knows to question.

The Professor in Owen’s Story

The most useful memory concerns the beginning of Owen’s interest in engineering and technology. During his freshman year of college, at barely nineteen, he took mathematics with a professor he admired and later credited with shaping his career. The professor had considered him the worst student he had ever taught. Hannah cannot initially recall the man’s exact name: it may have been Tobias, and she wonders whether the surname was Newton or Newhouse, while also remembering that he used a nickname. The uncertainty is part of the clue’s form: a remembered anecdote, incomplete but distinctive enough to search.

Hannah wakes Bailey, who may have heard the professor story even more often than she has, and searches for a Tobias Cookman who teaches college mathematics, particularly gauge theory and global analysis. She finds one: a theoretical mathematician with numerous teaching honors whose photographs fit Owen’s description of a deeply frowning, surly professor. In those photographs he is often wearing red cowboy boots. He is Professor Tobias Cookman, known as Cook. He has never taught at Princeton University; for twenty-nine years, however, he has been on the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin.

That discovery gives Hannah and Bailey their first potential external check on Owen’s account. Before this search, a private investigator’s suspicion that Owen’s name and biography were false could still feel like an inference. A professor matching the remembered story, located at a university Owen’s stated history does not explain, offers a possible record to pursue. Hannah experiences the lead as both progress and threat: if the story is accurate, Owen’s real past may begin and end in Austin, a destination that brings them closer to the truth while making that truth harder to welcome.

Seeking the Record

Hannah and Bailey take a cab to the College of Natural Sciences. The campus feels immense beside Hannah’s own small liberal-arts college, and the scale of the institution underscores the difference between a promising clue and a usable answer: locating the professor has not yet identified the student. They approach Cookman after disrupting his class and ask for information about a former student. Hannah identifies herself and Bailey, explains that they hope he can help, and is met with his understandable question about why he should assist young women who interrupted his teaching.

The women have a photograph of Owen, but they do not know the name he used when he was a student. Hannah explains that, if their graduation year is right, he would have taken Cookman’s class twenty-six years earlier. Cookman points out the difficulty: they know the name Owen goes by now but not his real name. Bailey’s response to the possibility that the story is true is that Owen lied to her. Cookman accepts that this is enough to proceed and invites them to his office.

There, the inquiry becomes collaborative and archival. Cookman has coffee put on while graduate students Cheryl and Scott help search. Cheryl downloads Owen’s photograph to the professor’s laptop; Scott brings out a large file. Cookman directs them to check the archives and request class lists from the registrar for 1995, as well as 1994 and 1996, so they will not rely on a single assumption about the year. The episode’s movement is from memory to search, and from search to records that can be checked against the memory.

The Spring 1995 Roster

The records narrow the possibilities. In 1994, Cookman taught two senior seminars; in 1996, he taught graduate students exclusively. Spring 1995 was the term in which he taught undergraduates, making that roster the best fit for the former freshman Owen described. Cheryl returns with the list and explains its limits and scale: eighty-three students were present on the first day, but ten dropped the course, leaving seventy-three names. Hannah takes the printout before Cookman can change his mind.

Fifty of the seventy-three students are men. Bailey looks over Hannah’s shoulder as they assess the list, which is a manageable starting point rather than a confirmed identification. Cookman cautions that Owen may not be on it; Hannah acknowledges the uncertainty but feels more hopeful than she has since the search began. The outcome is deliberately provisional: the roster does not yet reveal which student became Owen Michaels, or what name he used, but it replaces an open-ended hunt with a defined set of candidates and a specific semester to investigate.

Significance of the Investigation

The episode turns intimacy into evidence without pretending that memory alone can settle the question. Hannah’s recollections include ordinary, awkward details—a runaway dog, a late-night movie, a difficult professor—that do not resemble formal identity documents. Their value comes from their specificity and from the fact that Owen shared them privately. The contrast between those stories and the invented landmarks of Newton, Princeton, and Seattle gives Hannah a method: look for a detail distinctive enough to lead to an independent source, then test it against records.

The roster is therefore both a breakthrough and a boundary. It supports Hannah’s suspicion that Owen’s account of his education is false and points toward the University of Texas at Austin, but it cannot by itself establish which name belongs to him. By ending with seventy-three names rather than a definitive answer, the search converts fear into an actionable next step while preserving the uncertainty at the center of Owen’s concealed past.