42 pages • 1 hour read
We Were Never Here
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Chapters 23-27Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 23 Summary
Still at the weekend lake house, Emily notices boxes of Kristen’s childhood things in the basement and thinks it will be fun to explore them, but Kristen sharply tells her she doesn’t want to. Intrigued, Emily sneaks to the basement while Kristen sleeps that night. In the boxes, she finds dozens of old photos; in every photo featuring Jamie, the young girl’s face has been violently scratched out.
When Kristen returns from a run the next morning, Emily again mentions her fear about the Paolo situation, but Kristen maintains her confidence and insists that they’ll be fine as long as Emily doesn’t break down and tell something incriminating to someone, such as Adrienne or Aaron.
Chapters 24-25 Summary
Later that day, both Kristen and Emily reflect on their childhoods. Kristen hated her cruel father but loved her mother. She remembers that her mother was not supposed to be home on the night of the house fire; she was going to go out but ended up staying home because Kristen’s father was sick. Emily remembers her own unkind father, thinking of the time she almost drowned at a friend’s pool party, and her father scolded rather than comforted her.
That night, Emily conducts an internet search on Jamie and finds that Kristen lied about her friend: Jamie didn’t die in an “accident” but by suicide—within the very month that Kristen’s parents died. Emily tries to casually bring this up on the drive back, but Kristen acts annoyed and says she evaded the truth because Jamie’s death is painful for her to talk about. Emily begins harboring serious doubts about her friend’s past, wondering if all the deaths surrounding Kristen—her parents, Jamie, Sebastian, Paolo—really are a series of unlucky coincidences. She fears that instead, Kristen has a pattern of fatally violent behavior.
Chapters 26-27 Summary
Back in Milwaukee, Emily researches more about Kristen. She emails Nana to ask about how Kristen has been behaving lately, and she conducts an internet search on Lydia Brightside, the therapist whom Kristen mentioned that she saw as a child.
Pretending to be a graduate student of psychology, Emily emails Lydia to ask about the institute at which Lydia works, and she finds out that the institute exclusively serves children sent there by court order. Emily begins to more seriously consider the possibility that Kristen started the house fire that killed her parents, that she had something to do with Jamie’s death, and that she killed Paolo as a premeditated plan rather than self-defense.
Meanwhile, a representative from the Chilean hotel she and Kristen stayed at emails her; local police have instructed the hotel to ask all guests who stayed there during the time of Paolo’s murder if they have any relevant information. Over dinner with Aaron, Emily explains that Kristen is growing increasingly possessive of her. In fact, as Emily continues thinking after the date, she realizes that Paolo’s death happened the night she told Kristen about Aaron—the same night she rejected Kristen’s backpacking trip idea. Suddenly, she understands the whole sequence of events: Kristen, upset with Emily’s preference for her new boyfriend over the backpacking trip, decided to re-solidify the friendship bond by creating a secret the two would have to share exclusively.
At her next therapy session, Emily explains these suspicions of Kristen’s jealousy to Adrienne, though without sharing any incriminating details. Adrienne agrees with her and commends her progress. On her way out of Adrienne’s office, she hears Kristen’s voice calling her name from a seat in the lobby.
Chapters 23-27 Analysis
Emily’s and Kristen’s childhood reflections throughout this section add both explanatory detail and new suspicions to their friendship. Emily’s memory of her father shows that she learned the concept of being made to feel guilty through punishment early in life. Her near-drowning was a terrifying accident, not a misbehavior, but her father scolded her nevertheless, instilling a sense of guilt. Similarly, common tendencies to question women’s behavior or attire after they have been sexually assaulted lead Emily to feel that she is partly to blame for her own assault by Sebastian. The repetition of assault in Chile only confirms her idea that she and Kristen are inviting danger, that their attacks are their own faults. In addition to showing Emily’s past experiences with guilt and punishment, the women’s childhood memories offer another reason why Emily and Kristen became such fast friends: They both longed for stronger relationships than the ones they had with their families of origin.
In Kristen’s childhood memories, the fact that her beloved mother was not originally planning to be home the night of the house fire suggests that the fire may have been set deliberately and that the arsonist had reason to want only Kristen’s father dead. The natural assumption, based on Kristen’s arc throughout the book until this point, is that Kristen herself set the fire, but Emily does not jump to this conclusion.
Bartz recreates the atmosphere of a horror movie, where the audience suspects some danger the characters face before the characters themselves suspect it. This technique is not quite the same as dramatic irony because the reader does not know beyond a doubt that Emily is in danger from Kristen—but all signs point in that direction. Here, Emily begins to dabble in some boundary violation of her own when she looks at boxes with items from Kristen’s past against Kristen’s will. By this point in the novel, readers may doubt Emily’s safety with Kristen and therefore could see this investigation as a necessary boundary-crossing. However, both women’s mutual boundary invasions, justified or not, demonstrate that their once-vibrant friendship has taken a turn and is now a friendship in name only. While Emily may not be fully admitting it to herself yet, she has resorted to rifling through boxes in a dark basement in the middle of the night because her instincts are catching up to reality faster than her consciousness, warning her against her co-conspirator.
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