New York City is the setting for Hannah Hall and Owen Michaels’s first meeting and the beginning of the story she believes about him. It later becomes the place Hannah leaves behind to join Owen and Bailey Michaels in California, so the city marks both the start of their relationship and a major change in her life.

Setting and First Meeting

Twenty-eight months before the present, Owen enters Hannah’s workshop in New York City wearing a sports jacket and Converse sneakers. That evening, on the way to a theater, he takes her to a small tapas restaurant on Tenth Avenue and begins telling her about his life. The account includes Newton, Massachusetts; four years at Newton High and four at Princeton University; a move to Seattle with his college sweetheart; and, later, a move to Sausalito with his daughter.

The story also includes a wife Owen says he lost in a car accident, a subject he can barely discuss. He describes Bailey as the defining joy of his life, recalling that he moved with her to a small Northern California town after she pointed to it on a map. Hannah remembers these details as the foundation of what she thought she knew about him. Once she learns that Owen Michaels does not exist and that he deceived her about central facts, the remembered New York conversation acquires a second meaning: it was an intimate beginning built around a false identity.

Leaving the City

Eighteen months before the present, Hannah takes a one-way flight from New York to San Francisco. The Shop has paid for first-class tickets for her and Owen, who had been in New York on business connected with the company’s planned IPO. He stays in the city long enough to help her move, packing her apartment and studio with her before they leave.

The move is not simply a change of address. Hannah is going to live in Owen and Bailey’s home, which she expects to become her own, and she and Owen will soon marry. New York City therefore stands at the threshold between Hannah’s independent life and the family life she believes she is choosing. The later revelation of Owen’s deception casts that transition in a sharper light without undoing the fact that, at the time, she understood it as a shared future.

A Possible Return

In another conversation, a man offers Hannah a practical form of help by telling her to come to New York. The brief invitation gives the city a renewed place in the story: it is not only the setting of a remembered meeting or the home Hannah left, but also a possible destination when she is trying to respond to the crisis around Owen. The evidence establishes the offer, not whether she accepts it.