“Lottie understood what it was like to be ejected from the life you knew. So, when my mom and the five-year-old me showed up on her doorstep, fleeing from an abusive husband, my father, she let us take refuge inside her home. And eventually, inside her heart.”

Blair reflects on Lottie’s past and how she came to be a part of Blair’s life. Lottie’s journey from Vietnam to the United States informs her decision to open her doors to her niece and great-niece in their time of need, and Lottie’s kind generosity is a cornerstone of her characterization.

“Conflict, to me, might as well be synonymous with death. But this is Declan. I can’t help my curiosity now that I know he’ll be in that coffee shop a few blocks away from me every day. Plus, the odds of him hiring me are low anyway.”

Blair runs into Declan at the coffee shop when she goes looking for a job, and though she hates “conflict,” she decides to apply for a job there anyway. Blair’s arrival at the coffee shop shatters her separation from Declan in one moment, and this fracture opens the door to their reconciliation while also speaking to Returning Home as a Confrontation With Unresolved Versions of the Self.

“We might have known each other since before we could string multiple sentences together, but it didn’t change the fact that Declan was turning into a boy who made me wonder what I looked like from his point of view.”

In the first of the flashback interludes that takes place during their sophomore year, Blair thinks about her newfound anxiousness about her relationship with Declan. Blair acknowledges that she’s known Declan for years, but this knowledge of him doesn’t help calm her nerves as she begins to recognize her romantic feelings for him. Blair’s avoidance of her feelings at the start of the narrative serves as a counterpoint for her transformation into an emotionally open person.

“Perhaps unprocessed grief, over this current situation and Lottie’s, beckons me to act the way I do. […] I decide to up the ante on his weird game of pretend. I can act equally as naive and unaware if that’s how he’d like to handle this.”

Blair’s interview at the coffee shop with Declan goes awkwardly, as he pretends to be a mere acquaintance and asks her basic questions. Blair hates confronting her problems head-on, preferring to passively avoid issues or situations that make her anxious, but her grief over Lottie breaks her emotionally open enough to motivate her to push back against Declan’s cool exterior. This passage speaks to Grief as a Catalyst for Reexamining Identity.

“‘What that boy went through was very traumatic, sweetie. You can’t assume you would do anything different if you were in his position. You don’t know what it’s like,’ she says, hard as steel and somehow the gentlest woman in the world.”

Lottie reminds Blair that she’s not the only one who’s grieving, as Declan’s accident and solitude impact him similarly to Blair’s grief. Declan reacted by shutting Blair out, but Blair never pushed and reached out to him either. Lottie’s kindness and empathy, even as she faces terminal cancer, serve as a foundation of her character and help inspire Blair to treat Declan with kindness and empathy, too.

“What is love if not the desire to be there during someone’s lowest moments? What use does it have if we refuse to let the people closest to us share in our suffering when it matters most?”

Blair’s meditation on the meaning of love comes after she realizes how intensely Lottie attempts to hide her pain from Blair, even sending Blair out of the room as the hospice nurse helps Lottie shower so that Blair doesn’t hear Lottie cry out in pain. Blair ironically wants to be closer to Lottie as Lottie feels pain but attempts to push everyone away when she feels emotional pain herself.

“Despite my efforts to fight it, I feel a twinge of jealousy that his father cares enough to bother him so much.”

In a flashback interlude, Blair reflects on her father’s absence in the context of Declan’s father Randall’s pressures. Declan struggles to please his father, to perform in a way that makes his father treat him with love and respect. Blair struggles with jealousy over Randall’s presence in Declan’s life, and her inability to appreciate Randall’s negative influence in Declan’s life. This lack of understanding fuels the miscommunications that plague Blair and Declan’s relationship, while also reflecting The Conflict Between Personal Ambition and Familial Responsibility.

“Does she think she’s been successful at hiding her stress? She’s in over her head going from running a cash register to overseeing seven stores at once. But I drop it. There’s no use. The world could be collapsing and she’d swear she was fine until the rubble trapped her under it.”

Blair considers her mother’s career and the stress her mother feels coupled with her mother’s emotional repression. Blair wishes her mother would be more emotionally vulnerable with her, yet Blair refuses to be vulnerable herself, demonstrating the impact of Grief as a Catalyst for Reexamining Identity. Blair begins to realize that emotional repression isn’t an ideal coping mechanism, and losing Lottie helps Blair realize that she wants to be more open with those she cares about.

“That was me. Hurtling toward an immovable end. I was going to get answers from him this summer. Perhaps by osmosis alone. And I was already bracing for impact.”

Blair decides to take the job in the coffee shop to get closer to Declan and to obtain closure. Blair uses vivid imagery (an object hitting a wall) to describe her reentry into Declan’s life, illustrating the intensity of both her desire to understand the end of her relationship with Declan and her desire to have Declan in her life again. Her revisiting of their fraught past invokes Returning Home as a Confrontation With Unresolved Versions of the Self.

“Shouldn’t they assign me a pass for today? For the next seven hundred ‘todays’? My ‘todays’ would never look the same, but the dishes were still dirty.”

Right before Lottie’s death, Blair wrestles with her grief in the context of her normal life, especially as she looks at the dirty dishes after her mother told her Lottie will likely die within the next few days. Blair contrasts the normalcy of dirty dishes with the life-shattering loss of Lottie, demonstrating the difficulty of grief. Grief can strike and take Blair’s beloved parental figure, but she still needs to cook, clean, work, and take care of herself. Grief changes Blair, but she doesn’t yet know how to harness the change for her benefit, complicating the theme of Grief as a Catalyst for Reexamining Identity.

“He bores into my eyes with a kindness that pisses me off. It somehow communicates a multitude of thoughts through the fifty feet of space, rows of chairs, and laughing bodies between us. The type of look that is only possible through years of shared history.”

Declan looks at Blair during Lottie’s funeral, and Blair sees the emotions on his face clearly because of how closely they know each other, even after years apart. Blair feels angry that Declan wants to support her after being absent from her life for years, as she fails to understand that he feels the same way about her that he did years ago.

“The sentiment stuck in my mind as I stared into Declan’s soft green eyes. It was something big. So big that it felt too scary to acknowledge quite yet. But then, nothing. Heated stares dissolved with the turn of his head. Almost moments became nothing moments.”

After attending prom together, Blair and Declan resume their friendship without any romantic tension, which upsets Blair who had hoped their romance would finally develop. Her patterns of avoidance as a teen foreshadow how she will continue to struggle with emotional openness as a young adult.

“I’m twitchy, out of body, but I try to force myself to feel the cool metal of the espresso machine’s wand as I sift coffee grounds. To actually see what my eyes are looking at as I pull shots of golden espresso. I move in slow motion in a weird hypnotic state, like I’m trying not to startle myself.”

Blair struggles with her grief after Lottie’s death, and during her first shift at the coffee shop after the funeral, she feels at odds with her body. She feels as if her body and her mind are separate entities, and this separation shows the depth of her sadness and pain.

“As the silence rings out in the wake of our call, I picture myself floating out at sea, the tide taking me farther and farther from shore. I begin to struggle, but no one on land seems to notice. I can keep wading for a while, I think to myself, and kick my feet harder.”

Blair compares grieving alone to drowning in the ocean as others on land fail to pay attention to her struggles. This metaphor represents her friends’ lack of communication with her, her mother’s emotional repression, and the way the world continues to spin while Blair feels as if she’s standing still. The only exception to this metaphor is Declan, who notices Blair’s pain and reaches out a life preserver in the form of his continued friendship.

“He wants me to drop my dreams of going to Pepperdine to follow him, where I’ll be without a degree, without a path to getting a career, and without anyone I know other than him.”

Blair’s inner monologue represents the crux of her devastating argument with Declan. Declan views his offer to bring Blair with him to Notre Dame as an opportunity to support her dream of being an author, while Blair views his offer as patronizing and dangerous. Blair worries that the tides could shift and leave her without a degree or financial safety, a fate she’s seen her mother suffer, though Blair lacks the safety net of Lottie. Blair and Declan’s inability to see each other’s perspectives lead to the dissolution of their relationship before Declan’s devastating accident.

“The adults in my life were more three dimensional than I’d been capable of seeing. To me, Lottie was my calm, comforting second mother. She wasn’t a rambunctious teenager who once drank and dated a litany of boys. But the two didn’t contradict each other.”

Returning to Seabrook brings Blair a greater understanding of others in her life, especially Lottie and Blair’s mother. Though Blair originally felt offended that Lottie’s friends told stories about Lottie partying in high school at Lottie’s funeral, Blair realizes that the Lottie she knew and the Lottie who had wild teenager years are the same person.

“He saunters closer to me. So close that I can see the blue flecks in his irises. ‘Her memory. Her love. Her charm. It still exists here. You can tell by the way this house is decorated, even. I see so much of you in it.’”

Declan describes Lottie’s cottage as mirroring Blair’s taste and personality. Declan points out specifically that Lottie’s attributes linger in the cottage, and Lottie’s presence in the cottage inspires Blair to stay in Seabrook. Declan helps guide Blair to recognizing the benefits of staying in Seabrook, though he doesn’t realize the largest obstacle to Blair’s return is her lack of relationship with Declan.

“It’s the stuff after that I’ve tried to picture for years—made a disjointed, stitchwork Frankenstein of the memory that felt like mine by envisioning it a million times over.”

After Declan’s absence from her life, Blair imagines his life without any details or truth. She saw him win the championship game, but afterwards, she could only imagine the accident and its aftermath. Blair’s fixation on Declan is clear, as she describes picturing his life “a million times over,” showing the intensity of her connection to Declan as she confronts Returning Home as a Confrontation With Unresolved Versions of the Self. The passage also contains a commonly mishandled literary allusion, as Frankenstein is the scientist who creates in the monster in Mary Shelley’s novel, with the “disjointed, stitchwork” figure being the monster and not Frankenstein himself.

“Right. And by not in love, you mean your souls are intrinsically, infinitely, irreparably intertwined because practically all your earliest memories have been made with him and even as an adult you’ve been incapable of going one day without thinking about how he’s the only person on planet Earth who will understand you in the way that he does.”

Roshi’s words clearly highlight Blair’s failure to truly understand her true feelings for Declan. Blair claims to not love Declan anymore, but in reality, every word Blair says demonstrates the depth of her love for him. Hearing her love for Declan spoken aloud by another helps Blair realizes the importance of her love and that it’s worth the risk of emotional vulnerability with Declan.

“Taking my journal out and balancing it on one of the roots, I unfold Declan’s blueprint and stick it between journal pages to study.”

The symbol of the journal appears as Blair takes Declan’s blueprint and puts it in her own journal. She combines their dreams, Declan’s of building and construction and Blair’s of staying in Seabrook, by placing Declan’s work into the journal she writes in. Their dreams meld together as Blair decides to stay and build a life with Declan.

“You never held me back […] You and I both wanted to pursue our dreams. That’s one of the things that bonded us, but your dreams seemed so much bigger, and I was scared of relying on you, […] But that was dumb. Considering I spent the next four years just wishing I could rely on you anyway.”

Blair apologizes for her role in the fight that broke up her relationship with Declan. Blair realizes that both her and Declan clung to their dreams and valued the dreams of the other more. Blair wanted Declan to attend Notre Dame, and Declan wanted to do anything he could to help Blair become an author. As adults, they realize they must balance their dreams equally to build a lasting relationship, helping them to resolve The Conflict Between Personal Ambition and Familial Responsibility.

“But then the last time I spoke to her, we talked about stupid things. Like, the dress I was obsessed with wearing in middle school, and if I was going to eat the leftovers in the fridge or get takeout that night. We small-talked. And it really stressed me out, thinking that I was wasting her last moments talking about these random, inconsequential details. But now, I think she was happy to be talking about those things with me, because that’s what loving someone is. It’s sharing the tiny, stupid, mundane things about your life, because they’re everything to the people you love.”

Blair explains her last moments with Lottie to Declan when she finally opens up about her grief, and her dialogue illustrates Pham’s exploration of the importance of love and connection in the face of emotional pain. Lottie didn’t need to talk to Blair about anything important; she just wanted to spend time with Blair. Blair illustrates that quality time with loved ones matter more than the substance of conversations. The mundanity and specificity of life is what matters in the face of grief.

“We both forget to think about my romance book’s ending because ours is just beginning. And I’m here to stay, I will my face to say. But I think he knows. He pulls me down and wraps his arms around me, tight like he’s imagining when he didn’t have me. And to think, grief and pride almost kept us apart. The pride of having to grieve especially. He moves the hair that’s fallen over my forehead and places a gentle kiss there. And finally, I don’t think.”

Pham’s metatextual ending to the novel adds texture to the relationship arc between Blair and Declan. Blair struggles to end her own romance novel as the novel she’s a character in ends, but Blair and Declan’s relationship begins as the book ends.