Stolen

“Sure, I shrugged, breathless.”

This line has a different meaning to Gemma than it does to Ty. She flippantly and flirtatiously tells him that she would like to go to Australia. He considers this a kind of consent to her eventual kidnapping. This line foreshadows how Ty will continually find ways to make Gemma complicit in her own captivity.

“I held the glass above my left wrist, wondering if I could do it, then brought it down slowly.

This passage comes from the moment Gemma considers and then attempts to die by suicide after waking up in captivity. She frames this attempt as a kind of bravery and strength, knowing it will be difficult and painful but also knowing that at this moment, suicide seems to offer her only chance at escape.

“Because it’s magic, this place…beautiful. And you’re beautiful…beautifully separate. It all fits.”

This line is the first piece of information Ty gives Gemma about his motivation for kidnapping her. He connects her to the Separates, the rock formation that stands separate from the landscape. He sees her as similarly alienated and believes that she will connect to the landscape in the same way that he does.

“Then you pulled open the curtains. And I saw it all. There were no bodies. No dead people. It was just us inside the one-room shed. And the colors. I was sitting in the middle of it all. There was dirt and dust, plants and rocks…all of it scattered over the floor around me.”

This passage comes after Gemma thinks Ty is going to kill her when he brings her into one of his outbuildings. In a reversal of her expectations, she discovers that he spends his time painting with pigments created from the natural environment. She symbolically sits in the middle of his art piece, just as she sits in the middle of his greater attempt to build a life and environment to his own liking.

“I had slipped down, down into a dark, dark empty place.”

This image signifies Gemma’s despair. When she finds herself without options or any hope of escape, she describes this feeling of sinking as she dissociates from her body and environment. This concept connects her to the creatures of the desert, who similarly sink underground when the landscape becomes too hostile for their survival.

“Imprisoned, confined, detained, constrained, incarcerated, locked up, interned, sent down, abducted, kidnapped, taken, forced, shoved, hurt, stolen.”

Gemma writes these lines in the journal Ty leaves on her nightstand. She is so overwhelmed by the extremity of her story that she can’t figure out what to write. Ultimately, she can only search for the best way to express how she feels with a string of synonyms that express her captivity. Even with all these synonyms, no words seem to really capture the complexity and extremity of her feelings.

“When you started talking, you started changing.”

This line signifies a turning point in Gemma’s experience of Ty. She recognizes that his narrative profoundly affects how she sees him, pushing her into the next phase of her Stockholm syndrome journey. Learning about his life and understanding his past causes her to bond with him and see him as a more complex person.

“Whatever you think of me, your body, well, it’s yours…your choice what to do with it.”

This line demonstrates one of Ty’s manipulative tactics. She expresses her fear that he will sexually assault her, and he reassures her using a platitude meant to emphasize her bodily autonomy. Yet, he has kidnapped her and severely limited her bodily autonomy. He frames himself as her ally, yet what he tells her is a lie.

“‘You’re trapped, too now,’ I told her. ‘Don’t bother thinking of escape. He’ll only come after you.’”

This moment between Gemma and the camel connects them and emphasizes how the camel symbolizes Gemma’s captivity. She tells the camel the kind of thing that Ty would tell her, encouraging her to give up on escape. Ty’s manipulation has filtered into Gemma’s psyche, inspiring her to reproduce his behavior.

“The look in his eyes, well, it was nasty. Like he’d been waiting all those months for that moment. Just to get me by myself, like that and drunk.”

In this passage, Gemma recounts a traumatic incident when she found herself alone in the park with Josh Holmes, a classmate who pursued her and made her uncomfortable. Gemma understands the danger she was in and the kind of threat that men pose with their desire and entitlement. Josh Holmes is a counterpoint to Ty; while Josh’s behavior has a distinct aura of sexual danger, Ty never seems to sexually threaten Gemma even as he controls and manipulates her physically and emotionally.

“Sometime later, from inside the rocks, I heard an echo of a sound that could have been your scream.”

This moment comes after Ty opens up to Gemma and tells her about his ill-fated trip back to London to find his mom. Gemma sees the open emotional anguish his traumatic backstory causes him. He retreats to his place of refuge and safety to let out his feelings. His scream mixes with the land, becoming an echo that combines with the anguish of the land itself.

“One move and I push.”

This moment serves as a step toward Gemma’s empowerment. After periods of despair, Gemma has started to plan for her escape, taking the sewing needle and observing how Ty drives the car. She waits for a moment of vulnerability and threatens him for the car keys, asserting her own power and control and turning the tables, if only temporarily.

“If you’re really that desperate, Gem, just go. See how far you get.”

Ty attempts to belittle her, turning to psychological cruelty in an attempt to control her. Calling her desperate is a rhetorical trick; of course, she is desperate to escape her kidnapping. He has already tried to shift the narrative in his mind that she is a willing participant or that she can be convinced to stay. He casts himself as her superior and her protector, implying that she would not be able to survive out in the wilderness.

“First my toes went, then my legs, my body and finally my head…sinking down, down, deep beneath the sand. I fell through the grains. I kept going through earth and rock, past animal tunnels and tree roots and tiny digging insects, kept going until I reached the other side.”

This passage brings back the motif of sinking down when Gemma encounters a period of despair. This time, she has made her most audacious attempt yet, stealing the car and driving far away until it gets stuck in the sand. As the heat and dehydration take hold, she feels herself sinking again. Only this time, she is much more connected to the land and aware of the animals and materials that surround her. Ty’s attempts to make her part of this landscape have begun to work.

“‘Thank you,’ I whispered, my voice barely escaping through my swollen throat. Those two words hurt more than you can imagine.”

This line comes from the aftermath of Gemma’s escape attempt after Ty has rescued her. Thanking him hurts her physically because she has endured such hardship and nearly burned to death out in the desert. It also hurts her emotionally because she must admit that she needs him and that he was correct when he cruelly told her to try her luck at escaping. These words return him to a position of power over her.

“‘I love you,’ you said, simple as anything. You didn’t blink. You waited for what you’d said to soak in. It didn’t. It just bounced off.”

This exchange occurs after Gemma’s near-death experience in the desert subtly shifts their dynamic. Ty has had to confront the reality of losing her and behave more lovingly toward her. Gemma, on the other hand, realizes that she still has some psychological power that she can exercise. She can hurt him and deny him the kind of emotional support and participation he wants.

“‘This is what I want to show you,’ you explained. ‘The beauty of this land. You need to see how you’re a part of it.’”

This moment finds Gemma engaging with Ty’s painting on a deeper level. Unlike the earlier scene where Gemma screams and tries to escape, Gemma now allows him to show her the painting as he envisions it. Even as she acquiesces, he finds new ways to implicate her in this whole story, framing her as a part of this land, as though she was fated to be here.

“You shoved it onto my finger. It was roughly carved, shaped from a lump of something colorful and cold…a ring made entirely from a gemstone. It was beautiful. It glinted emerald greens and blood reds over my skin, and had tiny flecks of gold threading through it. I couldn’t stop staring at it. Why? I asked.”

In this moment, Ty puts a ring on Gemma’s finger, claiming her in some kind of marriage while she is physically incapacitated and entirely dependent on him for her survival. It is a transgressive act of love—a promise and also an act of claiming. In her most vulnerable position, she is receptive to the romance of it and feels connected to the ring as a totem of her relationship with Ty and her relationship with the land.

“Then, with my final bit of strength, I pulled your face toward me. My head left the pillow to get to you. Your skin was almost touching mine. Your mouth so close. I felt the roughness of your beard. I felt your warm breath, smelled the sour eucalyptus. I tasted your dirt and salt and sweat. Your lips were soft against my skin.”

This line comes from the climax of the novel, when Gemma is near death and Ty has made the choice to sacrifice his freedom to save her life. At the height of her vulnerability and at the prospect of being separated from Ty after he has tended to her and saved her, she pulls him in and kisses him. She emphasizes how in control of herself she was at that moment and how genuinely she wanted to kiss him. Yet the circumstances around this moment are so dire that her action is not completely autonomous.

“‘It’s when a victim emotionally bonds with his or her abuser,’ she explained, still writing. ‘It may be as a survival mechanism so that you feel safer with your captor when you are getting along for instance, or it may happen if you start to feel sorry for your abuser…perhaps he’s been wronged at some point in his life and you want to make it up to him…you start to understand him. There are other reasons, too: perhaps you are isolated with him; you have to get on or you suffer tremendous boredom…or perhaps he makes you feel special, loved.’”

In this passage. Dr. Donovan articulates the way Stockholm syndrome develops. The many clauses mimic the way this syndrome rolls out over time, in fits and starts, with increasing intensity. Though Gemma is not initially receptive to the idea that her feelings cleave to this pattern and can’t fully be trusted, this description captures Gemma’s experience.

“That’s what I hated most. The uncertainty of you. You’d kidnapped me, put my life in danger…but I loved you, too. Or I thought I did. None of it made sense.”

In this moment, Gemma has to confront the painful paradox of her feelings. She knows what she feels, but she doesn’t want to feel it. She equivocates in her language, making a statement and recanting it to signify how she has lost trust in her own perspective. She still can’t fully accept her feelings, true though they may be, because they emerged from a coercive circumstance.

“It was Dr. Donovan who suggested I write this, actually. Only, she didn’t suggest that I write it to you.”

This moment clarifies why this book takes the form of a letter from Gemma to Ty. Gemma has forged her own path, deciding to address the letter to Ty specifically and use this imagined conversation as a way to figure out her feelings and disentangle her perspective from his. It also shows how Gemma still feels powerfully drawn to Ty even as she needs to pull her life away from him.

“You’re stuck in my brain like my own blood vessels.”

This image shows how Gemma’s trauma has shaped who she is and become a part of her identity. The complexity of her experience—the suffering and reprieve, the captivity and liberation—has left her feeling deeply conflicted about Ty. Despite having tried so hard to escape him, she can only think of him now. She became used to sharing her life with him in a perverse way, and she will never be able to fully extricate herself from that experience.