You Belong Here

Delilah is Beckett’s daughter, and Delilah is set to start her first year at Wyatt College. They live in Charlotte, North Carolina, so Beckett drives her to Virginia to help her move into the dorms. The college is small, picturesque, hilly, and surrounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains. As fall arrives, the wind travels through the mountains, which creates a sound that the characters refer to as “the howling.”

The town beyond the college hasn’t changed much. The school shut down the fraternity houses after several “incidents” and turned them into faculty housing—one of the homes burnt down, leaving a noticeable gap. Beckett hints at the tension between the elite college and the less-affluent Wyatt Valley. Beckett believes people remember her unresolved link to Adalyn and the deaths. Beckett didn’t want Delilah to attend Wyatt College, but the college gave her a full scholarship.

Beckett’s mother, Doc, and father, Hal, taught at Wyatt College. Doc was a psychology professor, and Hal was an anthropology professor and in charge of the school’s archives. They own a home near the campus in Wyatt Valley. In the car to Beckett’s parents’ house, Beckett revisits fraught memories. She spots signs for Cryer’s Quarry and the deli. She hears the bell tower and wants to “run.”

Beckett and Delilah arrive late. Delilah tried to text Beckett’s parents, but due to the valley, texts don’t arrive if the phones aren’t connected to Wi-Fi, so Hal needs to reset the Wi-Fi. The characters discuss the lack of crime and the burned house. The latter caught fire in the middle of the night, and authorities attributed it to bad wiring. Unable to sit still in the house, Beckett goes for a walk. She notices a recently extinguished match in the dumpster near the burnt-down house. Beckett believes someone else is nearby.

Though Doc and Hal retired, they remain active. They guest lecture and publish articles, and they’re about to travel to Peru, where Hal will be a guest professor. Her parents have kept Beckett’s room the same, so the walls contain myriad quotes. Beckett wanted to be a writer; now she’s a ghostwriter. Under a shared pseudonym, she recently wrote the final books for an unnamed middle-grade series. Her agent is trying to find her another project.

Beckett feels stifled by the mountains and her troubled past. She accuses Doc of encouraging Deliah to attend Wyatt College. She then blames herself. She, too, kept secrets. She didn’t tell her parents she was pregnant until she was showing. After an extra semester, Beckett graduated and moved to Charlotte.

Beckett summarizes the howling tradition. When the wind arrives, someone blows a whistle. Students race through the woods and try to make it safely to the dilapidated old president’s house, which is lit up by a fire. Inside the house, there’s alcohol to reward students who make it. Seniors in masks try to catch the other students; if they’re caught, they must return to the dorms in the dark.

As a high school student, Beckett and the other teens would mess with the college students during the howling, as they knew the college and the terrain better than the college students. While they kept the college students on edge, they never physically harmed them,

Beckett and Delilah visit Delilah’s dorm, which is in the woods. Beckett notes the concealed entrance to the steam room, the construction site for the renovation of the student center, and her high school romantic partner, Cliff Simmons, who once pretended to be a freshman at Wyatt College.

Beckett and Delilah run into Violet Harvey. She married Joseph Wharton, a powerful developer, so she’s now Violet Wharton. She has a younger son, Joey (Joseph Junior), and an older son, Bryce, who attends Wyatt College. Violet and Beckett went to the same high school, but Violet was four years ahead of Beckett, and Violet never went to Wyatt College. Beckett highlights the “divide” between the town and college.

Violet and Beckett discuss the college’s past scandals and the howling. Beckett presents it as banned, but Violet implies that the students still do it, and they claim the wind noise is Adalyn. Beckett thinks of Adalyn and the crime. Authorities found two 24-year-old men, Charlie Rivers and Micah White, in the steam tunnel, and Adalyn had allegedly started the fire that killed them. Aside from Adalyn’s footprint and the footprint of a man’s winter boots that were a size 10, there was no other evidence, so Adalyn got away with it. The Rivers and White families filed a civil suit. At first, the school tried to fight the suit, claiming that Charlie and Micah were trespassing, but the school later settled in the hopes of gaining some control over the narrative.

Inside Delilah’s dorm room, they meet the maintenance person, Lenny, and the Resident Advisor (RA), Raven. Beckett takes a picture of Delilah and sends it to Trevor, Delilah’s father, who lives in Washington, DC. Whenever Delilah visited Trevor, he sent Beckett pictures and kept her looped in if anything went wrong. Becket remains worried about Delilah.

When Beckett moved into the dorms as a freshman, she wasn’t nervous. Due to her parents, she was exceptionally familiar with the college, and she felt like she belonged there. Her roommate, Adalyn, listened to the pop rock group The Killers. She had long blond hair and wore baggy jeans and a pearl necklace. She was a “legacy” student and only attending because of a financial agreement with her parents. Beckett, too, felt forced to attend Wyatt College.

Beckett spots a figure in the bell tower. Beckett follows them and discovers the person is Cliff Simmons, who has gone from a manual laborer to associate dean. She worries about Cliff interacting with Delilah. She wants to stay another night, but Doc thinks Beckett needs to “let go.”

In the town, Beckett spots a long line for the deli and the Low Bar, where she remembers the dartboard, jukebox, and stools. At the Low Bar, Beckett runs into Fred Mayhew. When Adalyn vanished, Mayhew was a young police officer; now he’s a detective.

Beckett reflects on her relationship with Trevor, who now works at a museum. Trevor and Beckett met during Beckett’s final “disastrous” year at college, where she spent time abroad. Trevor was finishing his master’s in art history. She let him believe the tattoo on her wrist was of a heartbeat and that her parents named her after the avant-garde Irish author Samuel Beckett. Beckett became pregnant, and Trevor wasn’t ready, so Beckett had Delilah on her own.

Beckett visits Maggie at her farm, and Maggie agrees to be Delilah’s emergency contact. Maggie invites Beckett to stay longer, but Beckett wants to return to Charlotte. On the drive back, she gets a text from Delilah, whose roommate, Hanna, likes the color black. She also receives a disquieting text from an unknown number; it contains an aerial photo of the college and the words “welcome home.”

As a young police officer, Fred Mayhew interviewed Beckett alone. He mentioned Beckett and Adalyn’s close bond—people called them “BeckettAndAdalyn.” He wondered how many people Beckett caught in the howling, but Beckett didn’t catch any students. She saw the fire, ran to it, yelled for someone to call 911, and looked for Adalyn. She couldn’t find Adalyn, and she wasn’t protecting her, yet Mayhew claimed someone saw her with Adalyn. At home after the interview, Beckett heard noises, but she presumed they weren’t Adalyn, who was “too smart” to return to her crime scene.

Via texts, Delilah updates Beckett about college: her theater class is difficult, math is easy, and she’s made friends with Gen and Sierra. Beckett also receives an email from the mysterious FordGroup, who offer her $200,000 to write a memoir for an unnamed client. At 2:00 am, she gets a phone call from Delilah. She realizes she’s hearing the wind from the howling, but the call drops out. She calls Delilah back and gets voicemail. Unable to contact her or track her location, Beckett, imagining the worst, drives four hours to Wyatt Valley.

The school sent Beckett a letter asking her to take a “leave of absence” and spend a semester at their London sister school. Hal claimed Wyatt College didn’t want the deaths to turn into a national story, and once Beckett returned, the incident would be in the past.