No Place Left to Hide

Throughout the course of the novel, Brooke is harassed by repeated calls from a withheld number that appears as “No Caller ID.” These calls are a motif that reinforces the danger Brooke is in of someone discovering her secret. The calls are so intrusive that she is forced to keep her phone on airplane mode. The motif of the calls serves a narrative purpose. Often, a plot beat of rising tension is preceded by Brooke checking her phone and finding that she has a large number of missed calls from “No Caller ID.” The calls are unblockable; neither she nor her coverage provider can stop them from coming through, and when Brooke changes her number, the caller quickly figures it out and begins their harassment anew.

The calls serve as a constant reminder of the night of Claire’s drowning and acts as a metaphor for Brooke’s guilt, like the heartbeat under the floorboards in Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Tell-Tale Heart.” In that story, the heartbeat is an illusion created by the protagonist’s guilty conscience that tortures him until he confesses. Brooke doesn’t have a conscience, so the force driving her to confess must be external—in this case, it’s her friends calling her anonymously.