Jonas Myers, Elyse’s husband, first appears in Part 4, Chapter 10, “Meat Cute.” Elyse and Jonas first meet through a mutual friend while they are both attending school abroad in Australia. As Jonas later tells Elyse, he is instantly interested in her romantically, even though she is in a long-distance relationship with someone else at the time. They reconnect a year later, but Jonas returns home to Kansas months before Elyse returns to the US. Their relationship then grows stronger over a series of phone conversations and video calls.

Jonas lives with his family in rural Kansas, where they own and run a cattle ranch. He later lives in Omaha, Texas, where Elyse moves to join him in the final section of the book. For Elyse, Jonas represents an exception to her usual understanding of relationships. Previously, she found connecting with people to be awkward and difficult, even impossible. She tended to experience love as a crushing weight because she either felt neglected or feared that she was making too many demands on her partner. With Jonas, however, she feels that it is easier to connect to him, and his love feels like safety. Jonas sees, understands, and accepts Elyse as she is, rather than who she might be or who she pretends to be. He is clear in his interest and wishes, and he always respects her boundaries and has the patience to wait for her to grow comfortable with him in her own time. The final lines of the book explicitly make the connection between Jonas and what “home” means for Elyse.

Marley is a male friend to Elyse during her childhood and teenage years. In Part 1, Chapter 2, Elyse and Marley are locked in a closet together, playing the game “Seven Minutes in Heaven.” Elyse reflects that Marley sees and understands her, and more importantly, that he seems to enjoy knowing her. (This is an important characteristic he shares with Elys’s eventual husband, Jonas.) Over the course of the chapter, it becomes clear that Marley has romantic feelings for Elyse. She shares those feelings but is afraid of losing his friendship, and because she cannot interpret his social cues, she does not realize that their romantic feelings are mutual until after she inadvertently rejects him.

This encounter introduces the Inaccessibility of Social Scripts for Neurodivergent Individuals, making it clear that Elyse must work hard to replicate the social scripts that others understand implicitly. Her description of her anxiety underscores the detrimental impact that these moments of uncertainty have on her life, particularly because her difficulties in this area prevent her from connecting emotionally with those she cares about. The scene also highlights the importance that Elyse places on being seen and liked for who she really is underneath all her masks and survival-based pretenses.

Landon appears in Part 1, Chapter 5, “Factory Reset.” He is the first friend that Elyse makes when she attends community college. In their Architecture 101 course, he sits behind her to copy her notes, and she notes that he smells of marijuana. He is an older brother who has anxiety and panic attacks, and this is why he recognizes the same signs in Elyse when she suddenly leaves class. Like Elyse, he admits that he has difficulty making friends in college, having “inherited” many of his friends from his older brother. Importantly for Elyse, he does not judge her for her panic attack, nor does he comment when she tells him about her OCD. Instead, he tries to distract her by making her laugh, indicating that they share an impulse to cope with emotional discomfort by retreating into humor. His presence offers Elyse a moment of connection that assuages her need to be seen and understood.

Tabitha appears in Part 4, Chapter 12, “When Things Go Without Saying.” She is a coworker in the hotel where Elyse works part-time while attending school in Australia, and when she finds Elyse’s notebook, she questions Elyse’s habit of making notes about her coworkers. She thinks Elyse’s notes about her are insulting until Elyse explains that she was merely recording things that Tabitha had mentioned in conversation. Elyse references Tabitha’s past remarks about how being good at something is not always enough to support one’s dreams; she says that Tabitha’s words were particularly wise and worth noting.

Tessa appears in Part 5, Chapter 17, “Is This Enough Space?” She is a friend whom Elyse met in California before going to Australia; the two were coworkers at a restaurant. When they meet again, Tessa is seven years older and has a new baby. Tessa is a no-nonsense woman who understands Elyse’s difficulties with social scripts and urges her to skip the “small talk” in favor of more genuine conversation. Tessa reassures Elyse that she is “loved exactly the way [she is] all in one breath” (208). When Elyse has a panic attack about her feelings for Jonas and his invitation to visit him in Kansas, Tessa calms her and convinces her to take the trip. Tessa offers Elyse a genuine form of friendship and love built on genuine connection and acceptance.