Throughout Chapters 1-7, the third-person narrator alternates between Meg’s, Claire’s, and Joe’s storylines to introduce the theme of the Complexities of Love in Various Forms. These three primary characters all have distinct personalities, lifestyles, and circumstances. However, they are connected by the common third-person narrator and overlap in their fraught relational dynamics. The narrator’s movements between their storylines create parallels between their experiences of loneliness and longing. Meg lives alone in an expensive Seattle condo and works as a high-powered family law attorney. Although “this [is] the life she wanted,” Meg lives “with an ache of longing that [won’t] go away” (69). She tries to mask this longing with work and sex, but these pastimes prove insufficient to satisfy her heart’s desires. Meanwhile, Claire lives with her daughter and father at their rural River’s Edge Resort. While there is “something about these gorgeous sixteen acres along the river that [fill] her soul” (26), Claire begins to realize that she hasn’t experienced romantic love in the entirety of her adult life when she goes away with her friends. Simply loving Ali, running the resort, and connecting with Sam aren’t enough to give her the independence and fulfillment she needs. Joe is similarly mired in his longing in these opening chapters. Ever since his wife Diana’s death, he’s been wandering around on foot trying to escape his sorrow. Although he’s free of physical reminders of his former life, his mind is perpetually preoccupied with his lost love. In these ways, all three characters are seeking more solid, loving relationships.

Meg’s, Claire’s, and Joe’s unarticulated desire for loving forms of connection is related to their fraught relationships with the past. Throughout Chapters 1-7, all three primary characters find themselves drifting into remembrance or recollection. Such moments introduce the theme of Personal Growth via Facing the Past—something Meg, Claire, and Joe aren’t yet ready to confront at this early juncture of the novel. For Meg, facing the past would mean owning what she did to her sister when they were children, taking responsibility for her actions, and healing her and Claire’s broken dynamic. Although she sees a regular therapist, Claire refuses “to discuss the root of [her] problems” because she firmly believes that “there’s no point in poking around the past” (4). Her refusal to meditate on her difficult childhood is a manifestation of her guilt, shame, and fear. Meg knows that if she begins to discuss this era of her life, she’ll have to admit things about herself that she doesn’t like. In avoiding the past, she thinks it will go away, but its wounds only fester inside of her.

Claire has similar difficulty acknowledging the past’s true effects on her life in the present—an internal conflict that fixes her in her frustration and longing. For Claire, the past is defined by leaving her mother in Bakersfield and losing her sister after moving to Hayden. Claire has done her best to put this era of her life behind her to focus on her daughter’s well-being and her father’s business. However, being away with her girlfriends at Lake Chelan gives Claire time to meditate on her circumstances. While sitting near the water with her friends, Claire finds the space to think more clearly. The remote, wooded setting influences her psyche. The natural world archetypally symbolizes peace and balance. Going to the woods and the lake (which acts as a subtle literary allusion to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden) helps Claire to meditate on her busyness and loneliness. Without the noise of resort and family life, Claire starts to remember how much her sister’s abandonment has hurt her: “Absurdly, she thought about the day her life had changed. When she’d learned that love had a shelf life, a use-by date that could pass suddenly and turn everything sour” (39). Claire thinks she’s gotten over this trauma, but the Chelan setting reveals otherwise and encourages her to acknowledge her unhealed wounds from the past. She hasn’t been able to talk about this incident with Meg because of the barrier between the sisters. In turn, because she and Meg haven’t confronted their past traumas, Claire doesn’t have the sororal love she needs in the present.

Joe’s storyline intersects with the sisters’ concurrent storylines and offers another iteration of how the past can control the individual in the present. For Joe, Diana’s death feels like a loss he’ll never get over. He is mired in grief in the narrative present because he doesn’t know how to live without Diana. At the same time, Joe’s decision to wander around aimlessly while meditating on his wife’s passing only further ensnares him in the past. He isn’t trying to move through his stages of grief but is rather punishing himself by holding onto Diana’s photos and talking to them. These photos are symbolic of the past and Joe’s reluctance to let go of it. He fears that saying goodbye to Diana and returning to his old life will mean that he’s betraying his late wife. However, doing so only precludes Joe from healing and pursuing new forms of love in the present.