Long Time Gone

When Sloan first meets James and learns that she could find her birth parents through an ancestry website, she is uninterested. Only when she learns about Preston and Annabelle’s disappearance does she become “wholly consumed with the mystery of what happened to her birth parents, and how baby Charlotte ended up as Sloan Hastings” (41). Though Sloan is a central part of the investigation, her interest is largely from the forensic side—she is more interested in solving the mystery than discovering new information about herself and her biological family. Nonetheless, Sloan develops an interest in the Margolis family, and Annabelle in particular, that deepens the narrative’s exploration of the effects of this long-held secret on her identity, as she reflects on how she came to be the person she is in the novel.

At first, Sloan’s interest in the mystery reflects her profession, and she approaches it with objectivity, but as she connects with the Margolis family, the source of her interest begins to shift. Sloan’s first connection to the real-life Margolis family is Nora, who quickly befriends Sloan. Nora was close with Annabelle, and she provides Sloan with an opportunity to learn about her birth mother. Initially, Sloan struggles to “find room in her mind for another parent figure” before discovering that “somehow Annabelle Margolis had taken root somewhere in her thoughts” (112).