Promises and Pomegranates

In this section, Miller uses figurative language to characterize the changing relationship between Kal and Elena. When they go skinny dipping in the ocean, Elena says, “it feels like we’re dangerously close to drowning here. A metaphor if ever there was one” (217). She means, first, that they are out far into the water, but her more significant meaning is that it feels that they are getting closer emotionally, allowing themselves to be more vulnerable with one another, and Kal especially is opening up more about his past and himself. The setting intensifies that vulnerability, since water becomes a space where Kal exposes what he has always hidden, his scarred body and his fear of being seen, which reframes him as a man who craves control because exposure feels like death. Elena’s comment also gestures to the danger of intimacy itself, since “drowning” evokes both pleasure and destruction. The metaphor underscores how love to Elena feels like annihilation, a radical departure from the duty-bound obedience she once practiced.

Elena’s characterization of real emotional intimacy as something life-threatening is indicative of her desire for control. Jonas uses another metaphor when he describes Kal’s decision to marry Elena. He admits that Kal was blackmailed into marriage but that “maybe it’s not the full picture,” and he suggests that Elena “should see if anyone has the other side of the photograph” (222). He describes the blackmail like it’s part of a photograph, a picture that has another half Elena hasn’t seen yet. Jonas’s comment urges Elena to read beyond surface causality, since Kal’s actions serve overlapping aims—protection, self-aggrandizement, and an attempt to repair early abandonment through possession. Jonas can tell that Kal’s feelings for Elena are real because he knows Kal and his motives better than Elena does. Finally, when Carmen reveals her former affair with Kal as the reason Rafe went along with the marriage, Elena compares the accusation to a “slow-motion car crash” that slows time and smashes her ribs (270). The revelation of truth is so crushing to her primarily because she has recently admitted to herself that she does love Kal. Thus, when he speaks, his “voice is a hot blade to [her] skin, laced with rust as it slices through [her]” (271), and she says, “[b]etrayal slithers like lava down my spine” (273). His voice, then, seems to burn and cut simultaneously, and her simile compares his betrayal to both a snake—via the action, “slithers”—as well as lava. It burns and carries a horrible sense of reality and foreboding. Elena’s compounded descriptions, which create multiple physical sensations and describe various threats, suggest just how deeply she now cares for Kal, a depth conveyed by how gravely his disloyalty pains her. The language of crushing and cutting also echoes earlier scenes of bodily marking, which binds emotional devastation to the novel’s recurrent emphasis on flesh, blood, and permanent traces.

Additional episodes in these chapters demonstrates the Ricci family as a threat to the core romance. Kal tortures and kills Tony after learning that Rafe needs money and that Carmen advanced the kidnapping narrative, then he mails Rafe a heart and thumb, a grotesque message that exposes how family power struggles drive much of the violence that surrounds Elena. Rafe instrumentalizes his daughter as a bargaining chip, having her attacked to extort Kal for cash, while Carmen manipulates public perception by framing Elena as kidnapped. Their actions reveal how both parents collapse Elena’s subjectivity into utility, forcing her to carry the weight of their rivalries and debts. The third flash drive, which captures Elena’s enjoyment at the beach, undermines the public kidnapping story, signaling that the blackmailer intends not only to control Kal but also to weaponize Elena’s consent in selective frames, which deepens the text’s concern with who controls the story of their intimacy.

Before Elena learns of Kal’s affair with Carmen, both Elena and Kal recognize that they are falling in love, further highlighting The Boundary Between Obsession and Love. They are both changing, especially in regard to one another. On the plane, Elena admits to herself that she loves Kal, later saying, “my feelings for Kal have shifted to the forefront of my thoughts, blotting out everything else until I’m living and breathing and bleeding for his man” (264). Her lapse in journaling, which Marcelline attributes to falling in love, functions as evidence that Elena’s inner life is being reoriented toward Kal, since the habit that once granted her privacy and reflection is replaced by embodied attention to him. Kal continues to strive for mastery and control of himself, which includes proving his continued dominion over her. When Elena offers sympathy because of his dealings with his family, he immediately wraps his hands around her neck, shifting his emotional discomfort to sexual dominance. This substitution reveals his inability to metabolize pity, since tenderness threatens his identity as an invulnerable enforcer, so he converts feeling into domination to reassert control.

Nonetheless, when they’re in the car on the way to the Riccis’ house, Kal says he is “powerless against the soft moan” he emits when she touches him (243). Kal hates to feel powerless, another reason he hides from evidence of his changing feelings toward Elena. He says that there’s “Something she’s aware of that I’m not ready to admit. Not even to myself” (243). While he recognizes that she may be aware that obsession is turning into actual love, he is not willing to admit this yet. He can control his “obsession” when he treats Elena like an object for the taking, but love is characterized by trust and vulnerability rather than control. Kal’s plan to leverage Elena’s birth control prescription as proof of a legitimate marriage for his grandfather’s trust shows how he keeps translating intimacy into documentation, which preserves power for him while postponing emotional admission. His decision to dissolve the trust in this section demonstrates his total surrender to his love for Elena. While Kal attempts to hide from evidence of his changing feelings, when they’re with Elena’s parents, she quickly realizes the reason that her relationships are changing is that “maybe […] [she’s] different” now (268). Her recognition that she herself has altered clarifies why Carmen’s revelation lands as annihilating, since Elena has just refashioned her identity around Kal, only to be asked to absorb the news that he once belonged to her mother.

Kal’s exposure of his scars in the ocean scene advances trauma as a through line, since he frames each “shiny divot” as a ledger entry of betrayal and survival, more than 100 brushes with death. Elena’s fear that looking at him will make her love him acknowledges how visibility produces attachment, which complicates her earlier equation of love with weakness, and helps explain why Kal has hidden his body from every other partner. This bodily unveiling also throws Carmen’s earlier seduction of Kal into sharper relief. As a teenager, he was preyed upon by an older woman in a position of power, his employer’s wife, which taught him to equate intimacy with exploitation. That dynamic now haunts his relationship with Elena, since her mother positions her as both rival and replacement.

Rafael’s late night visit in Boston, and his threat that Kal cannot leave his employ, underscores the transactional frame around the marriage. Kal’s immediate move to dissolve the trust reads as a bid to sever the last financial mechanism that binds his identity to coercive systems, which, paradoxically, occurs just as Elena discovers a different mechanism of coercion, Carmen’s past with him, which reframes Kal as an extension of her mother’s appetites rather than as a partner freely chosen. The irony is immense: Kal seeks freedom from his grandfather’s financial strings at the same time that Elena feels her own freedom undone by Carmen’s confession. Both are trapped by Ricci power plays that corrupt their attempts at genuine intimacy.

Finally, Elena’s conversations with Ariana and Stella mark how the Ricci household registers Elena’s absence. Reports of Carmen’s despondency and Rafe’s distance spotlight a family unraveling under the pressure of secrets and image management. Carmen’s body shaming of Elena and her jealousy are not incidental; they model a maternal gaze that treats Elena as a rival rather than a daughter, which sets the stage for the dinner revelation. Her fixation on Elena’s body and her bitterness over Kal collapse maternal authority into competitive cruelty, recasting the mother-daughter relationship as another arena of rivalry. When Carmen asserts that Rafe allowed the marriage to keep Kal away from her, Elena’s immediate revulsion and flight show that love for Kal cannot survive if he is positioned as her mother’s discarded lover, since that collapses the boundaries Elena requires to claim agency within the relationship.

Taken together, these chapters reveal how family betrayal and surveillance threaten to unravel the fragile intimacy Elena and Kal have begun to build, forcing both characters to navigate the tension between passion and coercion. The Ricci family’s manipulation underscores how Desire Overwhelms Duty, as Elena turns away from her parents’ control in favor of Kal, even as his past with Carmen threatens to collapse that choice. Their mutual misrecognition of each other’s feelings highlights The Boundary Between Obsession and Love, as both mistake vulnerability for weakness while longing for reassurance. Finally, Elena’s shifting perspective—acknowledging that she is “different” now and insisting on defining her marriage on her own terms—demonstrates the possibility of Reclaiming Agency Within Forced Marriage, even in the shadow of betrayal.