47 pages 1-hour read

Do You Remember?

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022

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Part 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 5: “Day Five”

Part 5, Chapter 39 Summary

Tess reads the first letter and then the new one that Graham forced her to write. It details Harry’s betrayal and Graham’s loyalty. Tess is shocked that she has no memory of the man who claims to be her husband. When she sees the cracked picture of their wedding day, she feels a sense of dread. She goes to take a shower and sees the message she left herself on her thigh.

Part 5, Chapter 40 Summary

Tess realizes that Camila is there to watch her. After seeing the message on her leg, she doesn’t know who to trust or how she’ll manage to call Harry. Lucy calls, but Tess is reluctant to trust her. She considers telling Lucy about the message on her thigh, but she senses she shouldn’t.


Tess suspects that Camila doesn’t like Lucy, but Tess likes Camila. She asks Camila about herself, and she reveals that she was in love once. Their eyes meet, and Tess feels like Camila knows she intends to reach out to Harry. Tess calls him as soon as Camila goes upstairs. Harry points out how weird it is that Tess’s father never returns her calls, so Harry called him. He says her father never received her messages, so Graham must have gotten a burner phone and put Tess’s dad’s voicemail message on it to trick her. Harry is on his way to her father’s house right now, but Tess senses that this is a huge mistake.

Part 5, Chapter 41 Summary

Graham comes downstairs for lunch, and Tess sees him leering at Camila. She asks how she and Graham met, and he says that her scarf blew into the ocean at the beach, and he rescued it for her. Tess remarks that this is how Christine and Raoul met in The Phantom of the Opera. Graham snaps at her, particularly irritable. As Camila serves his soup, she “accidentally” tips it into his lap. He insults her and then goes to change his pants.


While he’s gone, Camila apologizes for Graham’s “bullshit stories” and says that Tess deserves the truth. She gives Tess a small key that opens his locked desk drawer. Tess goes upstairs, and just as she’s about to open the drawer, Harry calls. He says not to open it, but she feels this is her only chance to learn the truth. She hangs up and has another “seizure,” recalling a fight she observed between Graham and her father, Douglas. Douglas insisted that she learn the truth, but Graham said it was up to him, her guardian. Tess returns to the present and opens the drawer.

Part 5, Chapter 42 Summary

Tess finds a stack of papers and can’t believe what she’s reading. Graham enters the room behind her, looking sad. He explains that she started having headaches every morning and then had a “seizure” while driving. After her accident, doctors found stage IV brain cancer. Treatment didn’t seem to work, so she stopped. Rather than feeling better about the time she had left, however, Tess grew despondent.


Her psychiatrist recommended that she get into a clinical trial for a new injectable drug used to erase trauma victims’ short-term memories. She did and seemed much happier. However, Graham finishes, the medication built up in her system and resulted in her forgetting much of the last decade. Douglas enters the den, and Tess cries in his arms; he fears that she might have been happier before she knew the truth. Harry arrives too. Graham says the doctors give her six months. She asks Graham to continue running her company, but she says she’ll leave him. Graham says he just wants her to be happy. She looks at Harry and knows he’s the one for her.

Part 5, Chapter 43 Summary

Tess decides to leave Graham the house and her company. He drops the restraining order against Harry. Camila gets a generous severance, and Ziggy goes with Tess. Harry still claims that Graham isn’t a good guy. Graham puts together a contract, and Harry wants Tess to have a lawyer look it over, but Graham insists that he wouldn’t cheat her. She just wants this to be done, and she’s about to sign when Lucy arrives. Tess feels an intense aversion to her best friend.


Graham tells Lucy that Tess knows about her diagnosis. Lucy admits that Graham stole from Tess and that Tess confronted him just before her accident. Graham denies it all, arguing that he deserves the company after all he did to help Tess through her illness. She doesn’t want to waste her last few months fighting him in court, so she rips up the contract.

Part 5, Chapter 44 Summary

A week later, Harry helps Tess pack; they’re leaving for an extended beach vacation. She filed for divorce and is suing Graham for embezzlement. Lucy confessed that Graham recruited her to frame Harry; he never came onto her. Lucy agrees to testify against Graham. Tess wonders what made her reach out to Harry a month ago, after so much time had passed. She thinks there must have been a reason, but she can’t remember it.

Part 5, Epilogue Summary

One month earlier, Tess sits in the doctor’s office. Her most recent MRI revealed that chemotherapy was successful and her cancer is in remission. Graham is shocked, and Tess rejoices. That night, she makes dinner and thinks about how she’s going to live. She wants to spend her life with Harry.


At dinner, Graham pours them each a glass of water. Tess suggests that she could return to work soon, but Graham demurs. His gaze makes her uncomfortable, and she notices that he isn’t eating. Suddenly, she feels immensely tired and notices a white film in her glass. Graham says she has been the “perfect wife” since she got sick, letting him control everything, and he doesn’t want to go back to the way things were before. She runs to the bathroom and, in red lipstick, writes “FIND HARRY” on her thigh.

Part 5 Analysis

The novel continues to use figurative language to reveal characters’ feelings. On “Day Five,” when Tess asks Graham how they met, he invents yet another story about how he jumped into the ocean to save her scarf. Tess remarks that this is “how Christine and Raoul first met in Phantom of the Opera” (294), alluding to a famous novel by Gaston Leroux. It tells the story of Erik, a disfigured musical genius who haunts a Paris opera house and develops an obsession with Christine, a young singer. For a long time, Christine is torn between Erik’s enigmatic brilliance and Raoul, her childhood friend and lover, but she eventually chooses Raoul. Thus, Graham seems to position himself as Raoul, though—ironically—Harry is more like Raoul.


Graham continues to think of himself as the “good” guy or the nice guy, the one who can and should “win” the girl (and her company and money, etc.). He sees Harry as a shadowy figure who threatens his happiness, a former lover who haunts their marriage. The irony is that Harry loved Tess before her financial success, and Graham only swept in later, hoping to capitalize on a relationship with her, but doesn’t genuinely love her. His allusion to Phantom shows either how misguided he is or how desperately he wants to paint himself as the “hero” in Tess’s life.


The key to Graham’s desk drawer symbolizes Tess’s agency and capability. Of Camila, who creates a situation that preoccupies Graham, Tess notes, “This woman has literally handed me the key to everything I’ve been wanting to know” (297). The truth of Tess’s condition was kept from her, just as the physical papers that describe her cancer were hidden. Tess chooses to use the key to unlock the drawer, despite what Graham and Harry want her to do. Graham kept crucial information from Tess while purporting to have her best interest at heart, and even Harry cautions her against opening it. However, Camila believes that Tess should know what’s real and make her own decisions about the remainder of her life. When Camila gives Tess the key, she says that Tess “deserves the truth” (297). This links the key not only to the truth about Tess’s condition but also to her ability to act according to her wishes, in full recognition of that truth.


Tess’s experiences continue to thematically demonstrate The Reliability of Intuition, even though she can’t remember the details that would confirm her hunches. Although she can’t recall walking in on Lucy and Graham having sex, her subconscious conveys the danger that Lucy presents. Regarding the message she wrote to herself on her thigh, Tess reflects, “I open my mouth to tell [Lucy] everything, but before the words can come out, I clamp it shut. Those words written on my leg were for my eyes only. I feel it in my gut” (286).


Tess senses that she shouldn’t confide in Lucy, and she’s right. Lucy has been completely untrustworthy in almost every way: breaking up Tess and Harry with lies about his being unfaithful, accepting Graham’s favors in exchange for her disloyalty to Tess, and even sleeping with Graham after he drugs Tess to sleep. Consciously, Tess can’t recall any of this, but her intuition still serves her and keeps her safe.


Conversely, Tess senses that she can trust Camila, implying that a woman she remembers nothing about and whose job title is a cover for the real work of surveilling Tess is more honest and loyal than Lucy. When Tess is desperate to call Harry, Camila purposely goes upstairs—after she meets Tess’s eyes in a meaningful way—and enables Tess to make her call. Finally, Camila gets tired of watching Graham lie to Tess and says she “deserve[s] the truth. Everyone deserves to know the truth” (296). Although Tess can’t consciously remember Camila, her intuition tells her that the young woman is far more trustworthy than either Graham or Lucy, and she’s correct.

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