54 pages • 1-hour read
Chances Are . . .
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Chapters 11-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of physical abuse and graphic violence.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Lincoln”
Due to poor Wi-Fi at the house, Lincoln sits in his car in the Tisbury Village parking lot on Friday evening, working on emails and texting with Anita. He receives a call from his realtor, Marty, who has important news to share. While waiting, Lincoln spots Coffin, who previously claimed that he does not drive, climbing into a truck. Suspicious of Coffin’s motives, Lincoln follows him on the Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road. Anxiety overwhelms Lincoln as he contemplates Coffin’s possible intentions regarding Jacy and Troyer. The stress becomes so intense that Lincoln pulls over and vomits, then struggles to compose himself.
After recovering, Lincoln meets with Marty at his real estate office. Marty shows him a tax map revealing that Troyer has no deeded easement to access his property; this makes Lincoln’s land essential for any legal access to Troyer’s lot. The discovery gives Lincoln significant leverage in any future dealings with his neighbor.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Teddy”
Teddy returns from his bike ride on Friday afternoon, emotionally drained from the conversation with Theresa. He overhears Mickey on the phone with a woman named Delia, discussing money matters. When Mickey invites him to Oak Bluffs, Teddy declines, preferring to work on editing a manuscript for his press.
From the deck, Teddy hears an argument coming from Troyer’s property and notices a gray pickup truck there. He later falls asleep on the deck, but Troyer visits and startles him awake. As the wind scatters the pages of Teddy’s manuscript across the deck, Troyer films the scene and mocks him.
Troyer then announces that he is withdrawing his previous offer to buy the house from Lincoln. He also reveals that Coffin has just questioned him about Jacy’s disappearance in 1971. However, Teddy is most unsettled when Troyer implicates Mickey in Jacy’s disappearance and suggests that Mickey has been hiding the truth of what happened to her. The confrontation leaves Teddy shaken, and he finds himself suddenly doubting his longtime friend.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Lincoln”
Teddy tells Lincoln about Troyer’s visit and accusations against Mickey. Lincoln explains that his own investigation led Coffin to confront Troyer, creating a chain of events that has brought new scrutiny to their group. As they process this information, Teddy reveals that he was the one who invited Jacy on their 1971 trip and that she had expressed misgivings about her upcoming wedding.
Lincoln makes his own confession, admitting that he felt relieved when Jacy left that weekend. Now, as the two drive to a place called Rockers in Oak Bluffs to meet Mickey for a night of live rock-and-roll music, they discuss the gaps in their knowledge about Mickey’s past and wonder what else their friend might be hiding.
Lincoln recalls his mother’s theory that Jacy had been hoping one of them would express romantic interest in her and give her a reason not to marry Vance. His memory of this conversation complicates his and Teddy’s understanding of that weekend, raising new questions about missed opportunities and unspoken feelings.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Teddy”
At Rockers, the three friends order food and try to maintain their usual camaraderie. Mickey invites Teddy to visit him on Cape Cod so that the two can extend their reunion beyond the weekend, but Teddy is reluctant. When he and Mickey visit the men’s room, Mickey confirms Teddy’s suspicion that Mickey’s band is the secret guest for the evening.
Back at their table, Lincoln alone is surprised when Mickey takes the stage as the lead singer and guitarist for the band, which is called Big Mick on Pots. Lincoln begins filming the performance with his phone. The music transforms the atmosphere, and Mickey’s joy on stage delights the audience.
As Teddy watches his friend perform, he dismisses Troyer’s earlier accusation and feels a moment of pure friendship and happiness. He sings along with the crowd, caught up in the energy of the performance. For this brief time, the tensions and suspicions of the day fade away.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Lincoln”
During a set break, Lincoln steps outside to call Anita and learns that his father has been hospitalized for a ministroke. When he returns to the club, he finds Teddy watching the stage with alarm as a purple-haired older woman holds a mic and insists on joining the band’s performance. As the woman takes the stage and the music restarts, Lincoln struggles to listen to a voicemail from Coffin and calls him back immediately.
Coffin reveals that Mickey once “beat a guy half to death” (187). This revelation comes just as the band resumes playing and the purple-haired woman begins singing “Somebody to Love,” which was Jacy’s signature song. Her voice bears an eerie resemblance to Jacy’s.
Suddenly overwhelmed by the situation and by the woman’s uncanny similarities to Jacy, Teddy loses consciousness and falls, sustaining a serious eye injury when his face collides with a wineglass and shatters it.
Chapter 16 Summary: “Teddy”
While under anesthesia for emergency eye surgery, Teddy deliriously reflects on his life and the events that brought him to this moment. He recalls collapsing at the club and learning that the glass shards near his optic nerve could potentially cost him his sight. The medical crisis forces him to confront his mortality and the fragility of his existence.
Teddy contemplates his history of falling, which began with a basketball injury in high school that affected his spine. He feels as though Jacy’s presence is haunting the island, creating an atmosphere of unease and mystery. Despite knowing that Jacy’s resurrection is impossible, he becomes fixated on the idea that the purple-haired singer is somehow her.
After the surgery, a nurse reassures him that the operation was successful and that his vision should be preserved. In his drugged, post-anesthetic state, Teddy mistakes the nurse for Jacy and declares his love to her.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Lincoln”
Lincoln returns to the nearly empty Rockers club late Friday night, where the bartender, Kevin, confirms that Mickey is indeed a local legend who is known and respected in the Oak Bluffs music scene. Coffin appears at the club, visibly drunk and in a talkative mood. He delivers a rambling monologue about domestic violence and reveals personal details about his son’s abuse of his daughter-in-law, Beverly. His underlying point is that just as he did not want to believe that his son was capable of such violence, he believes that Lincoln is ignoring the fact that Mickey may also be capable of violence.
Lincoln calls Beverly to pick up the intoxicated Coffin, but before she arrives, Coffin drops another bombshell: Mickey has a 1974 criminal record for assaulting Donald Calloway, the man who raised Jacy. Beverly arrives and manages to handle the belligerent Coffin.
As Lincoln processes this new information about Mickey’s past, Mickey himself calls with urgent instructions, ordering Lincoln to bring Teddy from the hospital and meet him at the Chilmark house. His tone is serious and final as he declares that he is “only telling this fucking story once” (219).
Chapters 11-17 Analysis
In this section, the motif of secrets and hidden truths reaches its dramatic crescendo, fundamentally destabilizing the friends’ understanding of their shared history and each other’s character. When Lincoln learns of Mickey’s concealment of his violent assault on Donald Calloway in 1974, he begins to believe the worst of Mickey, even as the latter finally insists upon telling the full story of his past. Up until this point, the structure of the novel has been built upon a pattern of gradual disclosure, and as a result, the fast and heavy revelations of these chapters create a renewed sense of urgency in the mystery of Jacy’s disappearance.
Coffin’s acerbic commentary on the matter forces Lincoln to confront the gap between belief and knowledge. Notably, the ex-cop advances a series of educated guesses that have a deceptive ring of plausibility but often miss the mark. As he offers up each fictionalized conjecture about the darker aspects of human behavior, his jaded mentality, tainted by years in law enforcement, adds a more ominous tone to the novel’s focus on The Unknowable Past and the Fallibility of Memory. In many ways, he acts as an unreliable narrator of half-glimpsed possibilities and distorted truths, and his lengthy monologue about domestic violence and police corruption ironically indicts his own past misconduct more thoroughly than it accuses Lincoln or his friends. Coffin’s assertion that “[men] don’t do right by girls” (200) operates simultaneously as a moral judgment and a strategic form of manipulation that is meant to prime Lincoln for the revelation about Mickey’s violence. However, Coffin’s investigative methods are not based on reality but on his own hazy amalgamation of humanity’s worst tendencies. As Lincoln finds himself influenced by Coffin’s dark interpretations, he begins to see Mickey not as a gentle friend but as someone who is capable of beating a man “into a coma with his bare hands” (209). Lincoln’s sudden fear and dread reflect the grim reality that long-held secrets can actively distort one’s perception of reality.
Later, when Mickey’s secrets are finally revealed, all three friends will inevitably be forced to navigate the emotional fallout in The Collision of Chance, Fate, and Personal Choice. Likewise, as the web of secrets collapses around them, this emotional crisis is mirrored by Teddy’s literal collapse at Rockers, which exposes his lifelong pattern of mental illness and vulnerability. At the same time, the glass shards that threaten his vision symbolize the novel’s broader concerns with the distortions of perception and truth. In a sense, Teddy’s potential blindness mirrors the friends’ willful decision not to see or acknowledge the realities of their shared history.
The Collision of Chance, Fate, and Personal Choice creates these chapters’ most devastating dramatic irony through the convergence of seemingly random events at Rockers. The unexpected appearance of the female singer whose voice resembles Jacy’s combines with Lincoln’s phone call from Coffin and Teddy’s collapse, and as these events occur in rapid succession, each one carries the weight of long-deferred consequences. The singer’s voice, which is described as “a dead ringer for Jacy’s” (199), represents the intrusion of the past’s unresolved tensions into the present. The song choice, “Somebody to Love,” with its pointed question about what happens “when the truth is found to be lies” (188), accentuates the characters’ central preoccupation. Finally, layered over these tumultuous internal crises is Teddy’s literal fall, and as the story devolves into emotional chaos, the lingering suspense of unanswered questions can only be resolved with a brutally honest bout of truth-telling, as Mickey’s cryptic ultimatum suggests.
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