57 pages • 1-hour read
Holly JacksonA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child death, death by suicide, substance use, graphic violence, cursing, illness, and death.
The next morning, Jet goes to Luke’s house to get the list of employees. However, he is home alone with his and Sophia’s baby, Cameron, and hasn’t gotten the information yet. As Cameron cries, Luke tries to console him and explains that he is teething. Luke asks Jet to check his phone for a message from Sophia with information about how much Tylenol to give Cameron.
Jet finds the information for Luke, but she notices that the message was sent on Friday afternoon during the time that Sophia supposedly left her phone at Jet’s house. She then sees Sophia’s next message, which says, “Call me.” It was sent six minutes after Jet was attacked. She realizes that Sophia and Luke were not together that night like they said, but she decides not to say anything to Luke yet.
Later, Jet tells Billy what she found out. They decide that without the list of employees, there is not much else they can do for now. Jet notes that they know one employee who works for Mason Construction: JJ’s brother, Henry. Although he got injured several months ago when he broke his kneecap and damaged his eye, Jet thinks that he is working again.
Jet goes to Henry’s house and knocks on his door several times. She hears the television inside, so she knocks more aggressively. When Henry finally opens the door, he is pointing a gun at Jet.
Henry apologizes for having his gun out. He tells Jet that he thought she was someone else but doesn’t elaborate. Jet notices that he has a bruise below his eye.
Inside, Henry insists that he doesn’t know where JJ is, but JJ wouldn’t “assault” Jet anyway. When Jet points out that it will be murder, she realizes that no one told Henry that she is going to die. She decides to tell him, and he seems visibly upset.
Jet asks Henry about working for Mason Construction. She shows him a stock photo of the hammer, but Henry insists that his tools are a different brand and color. He then tells Jet that he doesn’t know anything about Mason Construction, as he never worked for them. Jet tries to argue with him, then notices how gingerly Henry is moving.
Jet then asks Henry about his eye. He explains that the injury hurt both of his eyes. He is blind in one eye and will be in the second as well unless he has surgery. He can’t afford to have it. Jet tells him that he should talk to Luke about insurance, but Henry again says that he doesn’t work for Mason Construction.
As Jet talks, her vision goes blurry, and she begins to see two of everything. Her head also hurts, and she begins to doubt whether she is right about Henry working for Mason Construction. However, she assures herself that she is right and accuses Henry of lying. She asks him if he has been attacked by someone. Instead of answering, Henry walks her out and closes the door behind both of them.
Jet struggles to drive home as her vision gets worse, along with her headache. When she gets back to Billy’s apartment, she tells him that she just needs to rest. Forty minutes later, Billy wakes Jet up. She is relieved that she can see again. However, when she tries to move, her right arm won’t work. She begins to panic, and Billy insists that they need to go to the hospital.
Dr. Lee tells Jet that the aneurysm has formed in her brain. It has also begun to leak, which is common when aneurysms are on the verge of bursting. The deadness in her arm is likely a result of pressure on her nerves. Although Billy is upset at the news, Jet insists that nothing has changed.
When they get back to Billy’s apartment, Jack, Detective Ecker, and Jet’s parents are waiting for them. They go inside, where Ecker informs her that JJ has been arrested for her assault. They matched the synthetic hair to his wig, and they also traced the money from the loan back to his bank account. They believe he attacked Jet because she refused to marry him.
Jet tries to argue with Ecker, pointing out that JJ doesn’t have the tool set that goes with the hammer. He also didn’t know about the concrete being poured. However, Ecker dismisses her, insisting that the rest of the evidence is too strong.
After the police leave, Jet tells Billy that she isn’t done investigating yet. She wants to find out why Luke and Sophia are lying.
Jet shows Billy the footage from the Ring camera on the day of her attack. She confirms that Sophia had her phone and texted Luke, when she lied and said she left it at Jet’s house. Billy asks if it is normal for Sophia to bring baked goods over, and Jet remembers two other times when she did.
The first time was Jet’s mother’s birthday a few months ago. Jet finds the day, and they watch the footage as Sophia brings a cake in the morning. A while later, she returns, spends a few minutes inside, then leaves again. The next time is on the Fourth of July. She brings cookies, then leaves. However, outside the door, she drops a bottle of pills on the ground. Jet recognizes them as her blood pressure pills. A while later, Sophia returns. They can see the bulge in her pants from the pill bottle when she goes inside; when she leaves, the bulge is gone.
Billy asks if Jet has ever noticed her pills missing or tampered with, but Jet insists that she has never noticed anything strange. They decide to go to her house to check her current bottle.
Billy and Jet go to Jet’s bathroom to look at her pills. They pull one apart, and Jet tastes the powder inside. It is sharp and chemical. Judging by the look of the pills, Billy guesses that they had never been opened before. However, it occurs the Jet that her dad takes the same pills.
In Jet’s dad’s bathroom, they dump out of his bottle of pills. They can immediately see that they are misshapen, as if they had been opened and put back together. They dump one out, and Jet tastes it; it’s filled with salt. She explains that not only has her dad not been taking his medication because of Sophia, but he has also been consuming salt instead, which will damage his kidneys further.
Billy asks if they should go to the police, but Jet argues that she doesn’t have time. Instead, she dumps her father’s pills and puts her own in their place.
Jet goes over to Sophia’s house alone to confront her about the pills. Sophia initially denies it, then admits that she was trying to make Scott sick so that he would retire sooner and leave the company to Luke. She explains that Luke needs the company soon but won’t explain why.
Jet then asks about the night of her attack. Sophia repeatedly insists that she was at home with Luke. Jet points out that she knows about the phone call, but it doesn’t change Sophia’s story. She alludes to something going on that Jet doesn’t understand, but Jet angrily dismisses her.
Before Jet leaves, Sophia warns her not to tell Luke about the pills. If she does, Sophia will tell Billy what happened to his mother.
Outside, Luke pulls into the driveway, and Jet gets into the car with him. She tells Luke to ask Sophia about their father’s pills. She asks for the list of employees, but Luke tells her he forgot. She decides he must be hiding something.
She then asks if Luke was home the night of the murder. He insists that he was and that he would never hurt her. Jet realizes that she believes him.
Before getting out, Jet decides that she has to tell Luke about their father’s company. She thinks he deserves to know the truth, but she also wants to see if he knew about it. She tells him that their father is going to sell the company to Nell. Luke reacts angrily, violently punching the steering wheel repeatedly and yelling. Jet gets out of the car and leaves him.
Back at Billy’s apartment, Jet decides that they need to go to Mason Construction to look in Luke’s office. At the very least, they can get the list of employees themselves.
With Billy’s help, Jet breaks into the office building. She knows the code to the door and puts tape over the cameras. To her surprise, the alarm code was recently changed from Emily’s birthday to her own.
In Luke’s office, Jet goes through his files while Billy looks through the filing cabinets. Jet pulls up payroll to find the employee list, but she doesn’t find Henry’s name. She is also surprised to notice that when she sorts them by tenure, one of the long-time employees, Angie Rice, is not on the list. She checks the last several months and finds neither Henry nor Angie in any of the payroll files.
Billy shows Jet a couple of files that he found in their recent invoices. One is for work done on Gerry Clay’s house. They charged him $12,000 for marble but ordered a cheaper, different marble that only cost $7,000. Another invoice is for the work on North Street; Henry signed for it, proving that he worked on the site.
Putting the pieces together, Jet explains that Luke is likely committing fraud. He is saving money on taxes and insurance by not reporting employees and stealing from clients by overcharging them. She realizes that Henry can’t get surgery because he was never officially an employee of Mason Construction. Billy speculates that Henry could have attacked Jet as revenge or blackmail.
An alarm begins going off. Billy points out that it is the fire alarm and realizes that he smells smoke.
Billy and Jet try to leave the office, but when they open the door, they are met with flames. They try the back stairs, which are clear. However, the roof caves him, separating them. Billy tries to find a way through to Jet, but she insists that he needs to leave and save himself.
Jet returns to the office. After several tries, she manages to break the window, using a marble picture frame with a photo of her family inside. She stumbles out onto the roof below, and Billy appears to help her. He takes her to the side, where he climbed up on a dumpster. They jump off onto it, then lie together on top of it, recovering. Jet thinks that she sees a drone in the sky, but her thoughts are interrupted by the approaching sirens.
Back at home, Jet showers. She notices burns across her body. When she gets out, she struggles to dry herself and wrap the towel around her with only one arm. She grows increasingly frustrated, on the verge of tears.
When she finally gets out of the bathroom, she finds Billy sitting on the couch. She breaks down in tears, telling Billy that she is not ready to die. Billy holds her, kissing her on the top of the head.
The next day, Billy and Jet go to visit Henry. Jet confronts him with the information about him working for Mason Construction off the books. Henry admits that it’s true. Jet pushes him, insisting that it must have made him angry at Luke. She truly believes that Henry could have been the one to attack her. However, he confesses something else instead: He was with Luke the night that Jet was attacked. After Henry threatened to tell his father about the employment fraud, Luke beat him up and threatened to do worse if Henry told anyone. It happened at the same time as Jet’s attack.
Henry repeatedly tells Jet that this all happened because of money. He and JJ were desperately trying to pay off his hospital debt and to raise enough money for his surgery. Jet realizes that JJ must have taken out the loan in her name to pay the debt.
Before they leave, Jet asks Henry if she can borrow his gun. He hesitates, but she insists that she needs to protect herself. Henry finally agrees.
Back in the truck, Billy checks his phone. He has several missed calls from Jet’s parents.
Jet is called down to the police station, where Jack and Ecker tell her about the fire. Ecker also asks where she was the night before. She lies and says that she was at Billy’s apartment all night. Jet pushes them on whether the fire was related to her attack, but Ecker insists that JJ is still the only suspect.
In the foyer, Jet finds her parents and Gerry Clay. Gerry tells them that his son Owen has drone footage from the fire the night before. He claims that nothing important can be seen, but he is turning it over to the police anyway.
Gerry, who is a Town Trustee along with Dianne, mentions an incident from a town meeting, where someone threatened Mason Construction. Dianne tries to get him to stop talking about it, but Jet pushes Gerry. He explains that someone using a cat filter and a voice distorter interrupted their Zoom meeting about a year ago.
Changing the subject, Dianne asks Jet to come home for dinner, as she only has a couple of days left. Jet dismisses her but then feels bad; she promises to come the next night.
Jet and Billy go through videos of the town hall meetings from the past year. Eventually, they find the one where the person made an appearance with a cat filter.
The person talks directly to Dianne. They tell her that Mason Construction is ruining the town. They warn her to convince her husband to pull out of the current sale, or they are going to reveal a secret of hers. When Dianne insists she has no secrets, the person tells her that they heard the secret from Emily before she died. The video then ends.
Jet repeatedly rewatches the video. At one point, she can see the edge of the laptop and notes that it is rose gold. She then spots a window behind the person. In one frame, she can see the edge of a house. She recognizes it as the house at the corner of River Street. She deduces that the person in the video is Nina, just before she died by suicide, trying to stop her house from being sold.
Jet and Billy then discuss what Andrew told them: Nina got fired from the hotel because of Dianne. They wonder if Dianne figured out that the person in the video was Nina. They decide that they need to get Nina’s computer, hoping that there will be messages from Emily from 17 years ago.
Billy and Jet go back to the bar to find Andrew. He steals Andrew’s keys and keeps him distracted while Jet goes into his apartment. After looking for several minutes, she finds a box of Nina’s things with the computer inside.
Back in Billy’s apartment, Jet manages to reset Nina’s Facebook password using her email. She scrolls back through years of conversations to find Emily. In the last few messages, Emily tells Nina that she overheard her parents talking about Luke. She seems upset by it. She promises to tell Nina about it in school.
After going back to the bar to return Andrew’s keys, Jet asks Billy to walk with her. He tries to talk about the case, but she insists that she just wants to walk and not think about it. Eventually, she ends up lying in the grass and looking up at the stars.
Billy asks why Jet didn’t marry JJ. She hesitates, then realizes that she has nothing to lose by telling him. She explains that JJ always pushed her toward her dreams and envisioned a version of Jet that was happy and successful. She was afraid that she would disappoint JJ by never fulfilling her dreams. She also always wanted to move somewhere else and feared getting stuck with JJ and “becoming” her parents.
After a while, Billy tells Jet that he is wet and cold. Jet laughs uncontrollably, feeling relaxed and happy for the first time. They walk back to Billy’s apartment together.
The stakes are raised in this section of the text, increasing the tension and suspense as the novel builds toward its climax. First, Jet and Billy are confronted by a gun, which concretely underscores the danger and seriousness of their murder investigation. They then learn that Sophia is poisoning Scott, and Luke is committing fraud for Mason Construction. These moments continue to develop the theme of The Connection Between Privilege and Corruption by highlighting the entitlement of the Mason family and the crimes they engage in. While Jet is primarily concerned with her attack, she begins to uncover the corruption that surrounds her family, highlighting the way their privilege intersects with their moral ambiguity. Ultimately, Jet is faced with the dangers firsthand as the Mason Construction building burns, highlighting the danger to her life as she delves into her family’s secrets.
As the stakes are raised surrounding Jet and Billy’s safety, the danger is exacerbated by the novel’s attention to the passage of time. As Jet nears the end of her life, she begins to experience increasingly worse symptoms connected to her aneurysm. These effects are highlighted in Jet’s conversation with Henry at his apartment. As she presses Henry for information, she sees “[h]is hand snaked around the door, knuckles out, hinges creaking, like he was trying to push it shut without them noticing. A pang in the back of Jet’s head and the world split: two Henrys, two of his hands, two doors, and two guns, spliced over each other” (161). Jet’s increasing symptoms remind her that she is running out of time to solve her murder, while also reminding the reader of the narrative’s ticking clock. Her symptoms intertwine with the danger of the investigation, repeatedly permeating her conversation with Henry and obstructing her efforts to uncover the truth.
Throughout the narrative, Jet has been investigating independently of the police, and this section highlights her increasing annoyance with the police and their seeming lack of investigation. She angrily confronts Detective Ecker at the construction site, then expresses her disbelief at their arrest of JJ. However, at the same time, she hides valuable information from them, such as Sophia and Luke’s lies, the corruption at Mason Construction, and Henry’s fears over having worked there illegally. Ironically, Jet hides information from the police while simultaneously growing angry at their inability to uncover the truth. In this way, the narrative emphasizes her character’s increasing moral ambiguity. She is determined to solve her own murder and is unafraid of the consequences of doing so; however, she also continues to commit increasingly morally ambiguous, illegal, and dangerous acts in doing so.
This duality emphasizes Jet’s drive to prove that her life has value, further developing her lack of understanding of The Value of Living in the Present. In Jet’s eyes, giving information over to the police would somehow hinder her ability to prove that she is capable of “finishing something” for the first time in her life. She continues to focus on the future, in this case, the outcome of her investigation, at the expense of the present, including the damage she is doing and the crimes she is now covering up. She still fails to understand the importance of things like her time spent with Billy, instead insisting that it is worth risking her life—and Billy’s—to discover the truth of her murder.
However, Jet also begins to change in this section of the text as she grows closer to Billy. When her mother invites her over for dinner, Jet declines offhand, then hesitates as she realizes how little time she has left. She notes how she “softened, an ache in her chest that hurt her in small ways, not like the one inside her head” (254). Although Jet still declines, this subtle shift stands in stark contrast to the Jet from earlier in the text. She was consistently rude to her mother, dismissing her concerns, causing an argument at breakfast, and leaving home in her final days. Now, as she spends more time with Billy and begins to value his human connection, she even softens toward her mother, realizing she has very little time left to enjoy the parts of her life that matter. Similarly, after she and Billy return Andrew’s keys, she realizes that she wants to simply walk and enjoy the night. She thinks how she “thought [she’d] be worried…about not having time,” but instead “her gut had other ideas—her heart, too, picking up against her ribs, a different kind of song” (277). Jet’s growing feelings for Billy are central to this shift, and her growing understanding of the value of their friendship and her growing attraction to him keep her focused, for the first time, on the present.
Along with Jet, Jackson continues to develop deeply flawed, corrupt characters throughout this section of the text. As Jet uncovers what Luke and Sophia have done, their actions emphasize the interplay between the themes of the connection between privilege and corruption and Reconciling With the Past. Mason Construction’s success has afforded Jet’s family a life of wealth and privilege. While Jet has benefited from that privilege, she has remained largely separate from the corruption that has occurred as a result. However, with the revelations about Sophia and Luke, the family’s moral corruption becomes clear. Sophia actively poisons Scott, then dismisses Jet’s accusations offhand, insisting that she was “only” trying to get Scott to retire early. She ignores the consequences of her actions, believing that she was somehow justified in nearly killing another person. Similarly, Luke defends his actions at Mason Construction, believing that theft and fraud were necessary to continue to maintain his family’s wealth and status. As Jet continues her investigation, she forces the characters to reconcile with what they have done and tried to bury, confronting them with their actions.



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