We Are All the Same in the Dark

Angel goes to the cemetery, where the town is unveiling a memorial statue for Odette and Trumanell. Odette’s uncle, the pastor, goes on stage to speak. Angel prays, asking Odette for forgiveness: She believes that if she had not refused to speak, Odette might still be alive.

When the preacher finishes speaking, Rusty takes the stage. He is reluctant to speak, saying the event is bad for the town’s image. He shoots three bullets into the sky in Odette’s honor and says he is not finished looking for her. The statue is unveiled, and the crowd lines up to examine it more closely. As Angel and an older woman in the crowd are looking at it, the old woman asks Angel who she is, and Angel lies. She gets her turn to look at the statue and resolves to find Odette’s killer.

Angel helps the old woman get back to the man she was standing with. Her narration then briefly recaps the last five years: After Odette’s disappearance, Angel was placed in foster care and in a group home, and then with a foster mother named Bunny. Angel now has a scholarship to the University of Texas and is set to start in the fall.

Angel goes to the Blue House, which has been abandoned since Finn got engaged to another woman. She thinks about her friend Mary from the group home, knowing she would urge Angel to break in.

Angel picks the lock on the side door of the Blue House. She enters the house and examines the kitchen until she sees the Betty Crocker cookbook—the same cookbook her mother used—and reminisces about her mother and grandmother.

Angel keeps looking through the house, searching the hallway closet and the bedroom. She guesses that though no one is living there, the house is still being maintained by housekeepers and that Finn still visits. In the bedroom, she looks through the dresser drawers and then the closet, where her hand touches a foot.

Four of Odette’s prosthetic legs are in the closet. Startled, thinking for a moment that it is Odette, Angel runs out of the house. She eats lunch and looks at a map of the town that she downloaded from a blogger called “Trudette,” who closely follows the Trumanell case. The map is full of trivia, and the Branson house is labeled “do not enter” (206).

Angel drives to the Branson house. Wyatt answers the door holding a shotgun, and Angel takes out her eye. Wyatt, recognizing her, lets her in. He had an alibi for the night Odette disappeared, but Angel is still wary. They sit in the living room, and Wyatt tells her to talk.

Angel recalls when Wyatt found her. When her father was released from prison, he broke into her aunt’s trailer, where Angel lived, and stole her prosthetic eye. After that, she went on the run. She tells Wyatt all of this and says she came to pay her respects to Odette; she also thanks Wyatt for saving her life. He offers to take her to “the spot”—the place in the field where Odette’s truck was found and thus where she presumably disappeared.

Wyatt drives her there. Meanwhile, a storm is starting. They get to the field, and Angel asks Wyatt if anything was buried there. Wyatt says something was but tells her to never ask about it again.

Wyatt wants to show Angel the spot where he found her, but the coming storm forces them to take shelter. Wyatt takes them to a storm cellar and shuts them inside, claiming there is a tornado above. They shelter inside and light candles. He asks Angel about the worst thing that happened to her while in the group home, and she says it was when her friend Mary ran away. Wyatt blows out the candles, leaving them in the dark.

Angel starts to panic in the dark. Wyatt talks about dandelions—how he and Trumanell would blow into the stems to find each other in the dark. One day, he blew one too loudly, and his father found him instead. He says he almost did not pick Angel up when he saw the dandelions. Angel starts to ask if he thinks Odette is still alive, but Wyatt opens the shelter and they get out. They go back to the truck and drive to the Branson house.

Angel goes to a motel but finds the tornado has damaged it. She talks to the receptionist about what happened; all the hotels in town are destroyed, and the roads are blocked. Angel leaves and goes back to the Blue House.

Angel breaks into the house again and eats from the pantry before deciding to sleep in the closet. She wakes up sometime later to the sound of people speaking in Spanish and realizes the housekeepers have come. Angel panics, but they do not check the closet. She figures she can stay for a couple nights and goes back to sleep on Odette’s bed, but when she wakes up, Finn is there and has taken her backpack. She explains why she is there and apologizes, but Finn is angry. Angel tries to convince him not to turn her in to the police.

Angel shows Finn the note from Odette’s father and explains that Odette gave it to her the day she disappeared. Finn tries to convince her to go home and stay out of trouble, but Angel says she thinks fate brought her and Odette together. Finn agrees to let her stay for a few days in return for cleaning out the house. She asks Finn not to tell anyone she is there, including Maggie.