42 pages • 1-hour read
We Were Never Here
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Chapters 28-34Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 28-29 Summary
At Adrienne’s office, Kristen explains that Priya recommended Adrienne to her, but Emily doubts that she is telling the truth. That night, back at home, Emily re-reads the birthday card Kristen gave her and realizes that it contains a message in the coded language the pair made up as college friends. The message directs Emily to a shared Dropbox folder where she and Kristen store their travel photos. In the folder, Kristen has dropped a photo of Emily with Sebastian’s arm around her waist, walking down a Cambodian street.
Recognizing the photo as blackmail, Emily throws up in her bathroom and, immediately afterward, hears Kristen ringing her doorbell and calling for her to open up. When she lets Kristen in, she is so rattled by the photo that she can barely stay upright but tries to act normal. Kristen can see how ill she is and escorts her to bed. Before leaving the bedroom, however, Kristen notices what’s on Emily’s computer screen: the internet search on Jamie, a news story about the childhood house fire, and the emails to Lydia Brightside.
Chapters 30-31 Summary
Kristen erupts in anger and describes Emily’s suspicions as absurd and insulting. Emily counters by asking how the Cambodia photo can be interpreted as anything other than blackmail. Kristen tries to explain away the photo as a “reminder” that Emily cannot tell anyone about Sebastian and Paolo, not even Aaron.
She cannot understand how Emily can suspect her of such bloodthirstiness, she says, when Emily herself brutally killed Sebastian by kicking him repeatedly. Confused, Emily sputters that Kristen was the one who throttled Sebastian with kicks, not herself. But the more Kristen repeats it, the more Emily can visualize herself kicking Sebastian over and over again, the image surfacing like a repressed memory.
Desperate to get away for a few days to try to figure out if her previous memory of Sebastian’s death is correct or Kristen’s version of events, Emily invites Aaron on a weekend getaway to Phoenix. Ignoring Kristen’s many texts and calls, she books the trip. As Emily packs, Kristen sends a screenshot of the blackmail photo with a text threatening that she is willing to “turn over” the photo.
Chapters 32-34 Summary
Using the blackmail photo, Kristen forces Emily to come to her grandparents’ house, where she’s staying. There, Emily manages to calm her down, explaining that she’s taking a brief trip to unwind and is sure they’ll both feel better when she returns.
Before Emily can drive away, Nana comes to her car with a jacket she left behind. Nana gives the distinct impression that she wants to tell Emily something, but just as Emily is encouraging her to do so, Kristen walks up and interrupts them. Nana retreats nervously, and Emily drives off.
As Emily and Aaron leave for their trip the next morning, a barrage of news about Paolo frays Emily’s nerves. First, morning DJs discuss the case on the radio, and Aaron casually chimes in to voice his own suspicions of Paolo’s character. Then, Emily gets a call from an unknown number in Chile but does not answer and receives no voicemail. Then, she sees a CNN screen about Paolo on a television in front of her on the plane. The news reports that a witness has come forward with information about Paolo.
Chapters 28-34 Analysis
When Kristen reveals that she has a photo of Emily and Sebastian from Cambodia, she escalates the simmering tension between her and Emily dramatically. Until that point, all of her smothering actions could be interpreted generously. While it led to inappropriate conversations with Emily’s boyfriend and boss, Kristen could say the scavenger hunt was done out of love. While moving extremely nearby could be seen as dramatic, Kristen could say that the apartment was simply a good deal. While showing up at Adrienne’s might have been the result of stalking, Kristen could say it was a mere coincidence. However, her attempts to explain away the photo as anything other than coercive blackmail ring hollow. This escalation indicates that the narrative approaches a climax.
Simultaneously, Emily becomes an even more overtly unreliable narrator. As she begins doubting her own memories about Cambodia, readers may recognize that they are just as captive to her statement about Cambodia’s events as she was captive to Kristen’s statement about what happened to Paolo in Chile. Everything Emily has thus far told the reader about Sebastian’s death might be wrong. It is important to Emily to see herself as someone who could not harm another human so violently or fatally, no matter the circumstances, and it is this self-definition that Kristen threatens. Either Kristen is a devious gaslighter, determined to make Emily believe a lie by repeating it convincingly over and over, or Emily herself has more violent tendencies than her narration has disclosed.
Lastly, while Aaron’s reaction to the morning DJs’ discussion about Paolo is a fleeting moment in this section, it validates Emily’s fear about press scrutiny and the court of public opinion if she and Kristen were suspected of Paolo’s murder. As the novel nears its climax, there is mounting evidence that Paolo bore no guilt in his death and was merely the victim of Kristen’s plot to ensnare Emily back into a tight-knit friendship. Nevertheless, Aaron, a generally kind person, suspects the worst of Paolo simply because Paolo is involved in such a story. His reaction confirms Emily’s suspicion that the public will assume the worst of her if the story breaks. She seems to fear this public pillorying almost as much as she fears official criminal indictment.
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