The Stillwater Girls

Structurally, all of Kent’s key plot threads explore the motivations behind the keeping of secrets, giving nuance to the line between manipulation and protection, care and harm. The novel contextualizes each of the secrets being kept within the broader context of its keeper, suggesting that the boundary between manipulation is not a hard line, but rather a spectrum. Maggie, Kent suggests, kidnaps and lies to the girls out of a genuine desire to protect and care for them albeit by misguided and abusive means influenced by her own trauma. Davis, Kent indicates, keeps his secrets with overtly malicious, self-centered, and opportunistic intent. Brant, out of his own grief and need to protect his wife from the devastating consequences of her psychosis, withholds the truth about Hannah from Nic, leaving her in a fog of confusion. The novel’s treatment of these three secret keepers ultimately suggests that motives do matter. Although Maggie’s manipulative secret-keeping devastates and angers Wren, she’s still able to recognize Maggie’s genuine care for them. Davis’s secret-keeping leads to his arrest and the permanent destruction of his relationship with Brant. By contrast, Nic is immediately able to forgive Brant for his protective secret-keeping, regardless of the pain he has unintentionally caused her.

The novel positions Davis, the character whose secret-keeping is most purely malignant, as the villain of the plot, treating him with the least amount of empathy. As soon as he learns about Evie’s identity as Hannah, he does not alert the police or his brother, despite knowing how desperate his brother is to recover his lost child. In fact, he decides to trade on this very desperation to take further financial advantage of his brother. He kills Maggie, kidnaps Evie, and begins to extort money from Brant under the pretense that he will eventually return Hannah to her parents. Even though Davis is central to Brant’s few happy childhood memories and the only member of his family that Brant is still in touch with, the secrets Davis keeps prove unforgivable, and by the end of the story Brant has completely cut Davis out of his life. So great is the emotional damage Davis causes, Brant even goes through the home he shares with Nic and removes every photo and memento that reminds him of his brother, making it as if Davis never existed.

Kent frames Maggie’s lies to her kidnapped daughters as self-protective—they keep the girls under her control and cause them to see her as their savior in a cruel and dangerous world—but they’re also motivated by her own skewed perceptions of modernity and have very real consequences, suggesting that intent doesn’t change outcome. Regardless of her conscious intentions, the exposure of her numerous lies shakes the foundations of Wren’s understanding of herself and the world around her. When Wren encounters the kindness of Nic, Deputy May, and the medical staff, she cannot process it for what it is, despite what an astute observer and logical thinker she is. As Wren notes: “I don’t know whom to trust. Who’s good and who’s bad. If Mama could lie to us, then so could anyone else” (126). The exposure of Maggie’s secrets results in Wren losing Sage to another family and, at least temporarily, losing her own sense of who she is. Even once it becomes clear what Maggie’s motives were in keeping so many secrets within her ersatz family, Wren finds she cannot forgive her. Her anger and alienation at the funeral home evidence her feelings of confusion and betrayal—she cannot even cry for the only mother she has known for most of her life.

By contrast, the novel positions Brant’s intentions as wholly good, leaving any fallout from the breach of trust with Nic largely uninterrogated. While his secrets initially drive a wedge between them, tainting her perceptions of their relationship, Nic immediately forgives him when the truth is revealed, even blaming herself for the ways in which she misjudged his actions. After she falsely implies that he deliberately kept information about his trip to Ecuador secret from her, she thinks “I wish to myself that I could stop looking for invisible cracks and pin-size holes in everything he tells me, in everything he does, but until I have answers, I imagine this will be my new normal” (82). Nic is wrong about the nature of Brant’s secrets, but she is not wrong that he is keeping them. When the truth finally comes out, however, Nic reacts with self-effacing understanding, deciding that “Forgiveness is irrelevant…. The only thing he’s guilty of is protecting me from myself” (204). While the novel’s resolution provides a tidy end to the relationship threads and sets the stage for a happy ending for Nic and Brant’s reunited family, it risks downplaying the long-term impact of such deception and loss of trust in an intimate familial relationship.