Jacob is the secondary protagonist and Sara’s love interest. He is the identical twin brother of Sara’s rapist, but unlike his mother, Birdie, he condemns Daniel’s actions and struggles to accept and forgive his brother. Jacob, like Sara, narrates about half of the novel from the first-person point of view. He is a brilliant astrophysicist who has traveled the world, including Antarctica and Alaska, studying the aurora borealis. Jacob begins the novel after he returns to Savannah and begins fixing up the cottage on a small island that he inherited when his father, Tom, died by suicide. His journey as a character is rooted in trying to uncover and make peace with his emotions. Unlike his mother and brother, Jacob wants to reconcile his intelligence with his more sensitive, emotional side. In the pursuit of that reconciliation, he also has to reconcile his guilt and anger regarding Daniel’s crime. At Daniel’s trial, Jacob testified against his brother, and after Daniel went to prison, Jacob left Savannah and distanced himself from his brother’s crime and family’s cruelty. Daniel’s cancer is the precipitating event that drives Jacob to begin to untangle his complex emotions about his brother. As identical twins, they share many physical and mental traits. However, Jacob was always more sensitive, while Daniel was more intellectual and out of touch with his emotions.

Jacob’s relationships with Sara, Alana, and Hosea develop as he works through his conflicts with his family. Jacob’s first relationship is with Hosea, who helps him acknowledge his emotions and confront his conflicts with his family and identity as a Wyler. After the deaths of his father and sister, Naomi, Jacob is left without the parent who was warmer and more comfortable with emotions and without the sibling who understood his feelings. Hosea introduces Jacob to poetry and, via poetry, his own emotions. Alana, similarly, allows Jacob to access his love for his sister rather than just the grief over her loss that he has struggled to process. In loving Alana, Jacob finds common ground with Sara and Daniel; as a result, he begins to cope with his sister’s death. Finally, his relationship with Sara pushes him to confront Daniel and Birdie for the terrible ways they treated Sara. He finds a space to accept himself, sees a path forward to a new family, and works with Sara to help her heal and reconcile with her past. At the end of the novel, Jacob has found the family he lost when he moved away, discovered a new future in Sara and Alana, and gotten back in touch with his feelings.

Daniel and his mother, Birdie, are antagonists throughout much of the novel to both Jacob and Sara. Daniel is Jacob’s identical twin brother who raped Sara and has spent the past eight years in prison. Jacob describes looking at him as being like looking in a mirror but with a skewed reflection:

I don’t remember a time when I was ever aware of the differences between us. We have tawny hair, fair skin that glows the ruddiness of a sunset, and green eyes that burn in the dark…the malign yellow in his eyes has dulled the brightness that once resonated there. His skin has a rubbery texture, like the surface of a balloon (54).

Like Jacob and Alana, he is immensely intelligent, but like Birdie, that intelligence overpowers any sense of compassion or emotion. He is initially portrayed as self-absorbed and arrogant, focused only on rehabilitating his image and saving his own life. However, his character is dynamic, as he changes throughout the novel. Although his arrogance and cruelty still occasionally erupt in his interactions with Jacob, at the end of the novel, following his discovery of his daughter’s existence, he makes his peace with the full consequences of his actions. In doing so, he admits that he did rape Sara and cause physical and emotional harm to her and her family.

Birdie questions the rape and Daniel’s guilt. She is portrayed as cold and single-focused, only interested in Daniel’s potential success. Though she, like her children, is immensely intelligent and prizes intelligence above all, she never pursued a professional career: “Bernadette ‘Birdie’ Ross graduated from Yale with double degrees in biology and chemistry. However, she never worked for a wage outside our home nor had any inclination to do so” (30). Birdie’s identity is directly tied to motherhood and the success of her children. Despite this, she is more nurturing toward the plants in her garden than toward her children. At the end of the novel, Daniel tells Birdie that she never guided them through grief, which is part of the reason why he says he behaved violently toward Sara. Birdie is not a flat, one-dimensional character. When both of her sons insist that she acknowledge the truth and she comes face-to-face with Alana, she can move beyond her grief and bitterness to apologize to Sara for the harm she has caused her.