Opening
At dawn, Chloe Davis realizes the smiling face on the Cypress Stables website belongs to Aubrey Gravino—and that the venue she and Daniel Briggs booked is owned by Aubrey’s family. The wedding fantasy curdles into threat, and the veneer of normalcy cracks, pulling Chloe deeper into a maze of suspicion and Deception and Appearance vs. Reality.
What Happens
Chapter 31
At her office before sunrise, Chloe stares at the Cypress Stables homepage until the realization lands: Aubrey Gravino is part of the family that owns the venue where she and Daniel plan to marry. She remembers the site visit—the family clustered by the barn, the helpful grandmother—and speeds through the old images in her head until fear arrests her. That beautiful place, which once signaled a future, now looks like a stage set for something else entirely.
Her mind rewinds to the kayak trip Daniel insisted on, the route gliding along the same cypress-lined shore. What felt romantic now reads like a taunt—Daniel steering her past the truth to see if she will spot it. The echo between Cypress Stables and Cypress Cemetery is too pointed. At the office, she quietly probes Melissa about the engagement party timeline: Daniel arrived just before Chloe, came straight from work, and took a long shower. That gap—Lacey Deckler leaving Chloe’s office, Daniel unaccounted for—creates a chilling window. Guilt floods in: years ago she unknowingly led girls to her father; now she fears she helped Daniel “wash away” something, too. Sickness rising, she tells Melissa to clear her end-of-week schedule. Chloe is going to find proof, no matter the cost.
This choice springs from the weight of The Lingering Trauma of the Past. The past dictates her instincts: investigate first, trust later, and accept that the prettiest places are often where the worst things hide.
Chapter 32
Chloe packs a small suitcase and tells Daniel she’s off to New Orleans for a bachelorette weekend. He smiles, touches her side; she recoils and notices a fresh scratch raked along his ribs. To keep him at bay, she invents a “no contact” rule for the girls’ trip and warns him not to text her friends—she’s already lying to him, and now she must lie about lying. The ruse locks her into a survival posture that mirrors Family Secrets and Dysfunctional Loyalty: protect the bond, protect the truth, and pretend both can coexist.
Flashbacks detail her off-the-books investigation. Daniel’s “work conference” in New Orleans? He was never registered at the hotel. His locked briefcase? She cracks it: 72619, their wedding date—a sentimental code protecting something dark. At work, Detective Thomas drops by. Chloe repeats the bachelorette story. He counters with a new blow: after her stunt at Bert Rhodes’s house, Bert Rhodes wants a restraining order. Thomas doubts the miraculous timing of her “discovering” Bert’s website. Then he drops a name that curdles her blood: Ethan Walker.
Chapter 33
The scene jumps back to LSU. Chloe, dulled by anxiety meds at a fraternity party, spots Ethan—calm, handsome, attentive. Her roommate Sarah flits to him first, reigniting Chloe’s old jealousy, but Ethan crosses the room and asks Chloe if she wants quiet. They migrate to the kitchen and talk for four hours, a world shrinking to two people and a cracked tile floor.
That night becomes a beginning. The chapter lingers on firsts—first confidences, first slivers of trust, first certainty that someone sees her beyond the shadow of her father. The romance reads like an antidote to the present: open, uncomplicated, kind. It also sets up the bomb Detective Thomas is about to detonate with “the whole story.”
Chapter 34
Back in the present, Thomas presses Chloe to tell him everything about Ethan. She does. Eight months into dating, Sarah “goes missing.” Ethan grows cagey; Chloe finds a dark, spreading stain on Sarah’s mattress. Certain the police won’t believe a serial killer’s daughter, she does what she always does: she investigates alone. She breaks into Ethan’s apartment, heart roaring, ready to find a monster.
Instead, she finds Ethan in bed with Sarah. The “disappearance” is a cover for their affair. The “blood” is from Sarah’s miscarriage. Humiliation flattens Chloe as the story flips: she’s not a savior, she’s a “crazy ex-girlfriend.” Ethan files a restraining order, and the rumor calcifies. This becomes the centerpiece of Memory, Paranoia, and Unreliable Narration: Chloe’s instincts might be right, but her history makes them easy to dismiss.
Thomas swings the hammer. He cites Chloe’s past pill abuse as proof of paranoia, then reveals the police saw her at Aubrey’s crime scene. An officer watched her hold the earring. Forensics pulled only Chloe’s DNA from it—not Aubrey’s. The insinuation lands: she planted it or she’s involved. He orders her to stop playing detective. When he leaves, Chloe realizes the last safety net is gone. She cannot go to the police about Daniel.
Chapter 35
Chloe white-knuckles through morning sessions, tells Melissa she’s headed to New Orleans for a “mental health break,” then drives to a no-name motel off the interstate. Room Twelve smells like cleanser and fear. She texts a number. A knock. It’s Aaron Jansen / Tyler Price, the reporter, thin with hunger for a scoop.
Cut off from the police and boxed in by her own reputation, Chloe needs an ally—and a cover. She feeds Aaron a false lead: a cold case from twenty years ago, a girl who vanished during her father’s original murders. Maybe, she suggests, that long-ago abductor is the copycat. Aaron bites. They head for the missing girl’s mother, Dianne. Chloe’s real target—Daniel—stays unspoken as she launches an investigation built on a lie.
Character Development
Chloe pivots from anxious observer to rogue investigator, stripped of institutional credibility and driven by old wounds that now serve as both a compass and a trap.
- Chloe Davis: Isolation hardens her resolve. After the Ethan reveal and the earring debacle, she accepts that no authority will help her. She lies strategically—to Daniel, Melissa, and Aaron—to build her own case.
- Daniel Briggs: His polished façade erodes: unexplained scratch, proven lies, intimate ties to Aubrey’s family, and a kayak route that doubles as a taunt. In Chloe’s mind, he shifts from suspect to certainty.
- Detective Thomas: He becomes an obstacle. By weaponizing Chloe’s past (Ethan, pills, the earring), he reframes her as a danger, not a witness, and closes the door to official channels.
- Aaron Jansen / Tyler Price: He reenters as Chloe’s reluctant partner. Hungry for a break and unaware he’s a decoy, he provides access and momentum Chloe can’t get elsewhere.
- Melissa: A quiet anchor who senses the strain but accepts Chloe’s “mental health” cover, highlighting how alone Chloe chooses to be.
Themes & Symbols
The book tightens its study of Deception and Appearance vs. Reality. The wedding venue—idyllic Cypress Stables—camouflages a dark thread connecting Daniel to a victim’s family. Daniel’s romance becomes performance. Chloe’s “girls’ trip,” “no contact” policy, and motel rendezvous make her complicit in the very masking she fears, turning deception into both weapon and wound.
The chapters also deepen The Lingering Trauma of the Past and Family Secrets and Dysfunctional Loyalty. Chloe’s history with her father and Ethan primes her to distrust men and institutions; those memories are the only tools she trusts, but they also undermine her credibility. Her loyalty—first to the fantasy of marriage, then to her own private truth—forces her to lie to those closest to her, a coping mechanism that mirrors the killer’s concealment.
Symbolically, the earring flips from clue to curse. With only Chloe’s DNA, it stops pointing outward and circles back to her, turning evidence into indictment and collapsing the safe boundary between investigator and suspect.
Key Quotes
“wash away”
- Chloe’s phrase for helping Daniel clean up—literal or psychological—captures her terror that intimacy has made her an accessory. The language collapses romance and complicity into a single act.
“no contact”
- The invented rule for the girls’ trip functions as both alibi and moat. It dramatizes Chloe’s need to control information while underscoring how secrecy now governs her relationships.
“crazy ex-girlfriend”
- The label from the Ethan episode becomes institutional shorthand to dismiss Chloe. It’s a gendered smear that converts trauma into unreliability and haunts every conversation with law enforcement.
“mental health break”
- Chloe’s euphemism to Melissa turns self-preservation into polite small talk. The phrase shows how survival strategies get laundered into acceptability, hiding the panic beneath.
“the whole story”
- Thomas’s demand frames narrative as power. Whoever controls the story controls the investigation—here, he uses Chloe’s past to author a present in which she can’t be believed.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters form the novel’s hinge. The police shift Chloe from ally to suspect, severing institutional support and forcing her off the grid. The Ethan backstory provides a plausible reason for authorities to doubt her, even as the reader feels the dread that she’s right about Daniel. By recruiting Aaron under false pretenses, Chloe commits to a solitary, high-risk path: she must expose a killer who shares her bed while staying ahead of a police narrative that already condemns her. The stakes escalate on every front—romantic, legal, and psychological—driving the story into its endgame.