Chloe Davis

Quick Facts

A thirty-two-year-old Baton Rouge medical psychologist, Chloe Davis is the novel’s protagonist and first-person narrator. First appearance: the Prologue. Key relationships: father Richard Davis, brother Cooper Davis, fiancé Daniel Briggs, patient and mirror-figure Lacey Deckler, and the duplicitous “reporter” Tyler Price. Hometown shadow: Breaux Bridge, where six girls were killed when Chloe was twelve.

Who She Is

Chloe is a “wounded healer” whose career—treating traumatized teens—springs from a childhood ruptured when her father was arrested as a serial killer. She manages life through ritual, medication, and hypervigilance, but the anniversary of the murders and a new wave of disappearances rip open the past she’s tried to sedate. As she narrates, her clinical self-awareness clashes with spiraling doubt, making her both the story’s guide and its most precarious witness.

Chloe’s appearance mirrors her inner state: limp brown hair frizzed by Louisiana humidity, a face she calls “rough” on sleepless days. The blur between how she feels and how she looks becomes a visual shorthand for mounting anxiety.

Personality & Traits

Chloe’s psyche is a battleground of acute empathy and corrosive fear. She knows the textbook definitions for trauma yet lives at the mercy of its symptoms, toggling between therapeutic insight and self-sabotage. Her greatest strength—reading people—keeps colliding with her greatest liability: the terror that she’s misreading everything.

• Traumatized and paranoid: A practitioner of constant self-protection, Chloe triple-checks locks, avoids darkness (she names her fear as “nyctophobia”), and scans rooms for exits. Her vigilance stems from The Lingering Trauma of the Past, where the “monster” was inside her home.
• Unreliable narrator: Anxiety, fragmented memory, and substance use warp her perception, aligning her with the theme of Memory, Paranoia, and Unreliable Narration. Mixing benzodiazepines with wine leaves her with skips in time and detail—crucial when she begins to suspect those closest to her.
• Intelligent and empathetic: In session, she connects with teens like Lacey Deckler, translating their shame into language and plans. She can name her own coping mechanisms in clinical terms, even when she’s too exhausted or frightened to resist them.
• Prone to substance abuse: To “stay in control,” she forges prescriptions (in her fiancé’s name) for Xanax and Ativan, convincing herself the drugs keep her safe even as they compromise her judgment at pivotal moments.
• Isolated and guilt-ridden: Chloe keeps her circle narrow and her secrets closer. She’s tormented by the possibility that she missed signs in childhood—and that the new victims’ blood is, somehow, on her hands if she fails to stop the pattern.

Character Journey

At the start, Chloe functions by forcing stability: structured routines, measured doses, and a wedding to plan. The anniversary call from a reporter detonates that fragile order, and when girls begin vanishing in ways that echo the old case, she’s dragged back to Breaux Bridge in mind and body. Her suspicion ricochets from strangers to intimates—especially Daniel—stoked by Cooper’s insinuations and her own gaps in memory. She wades into the investigation, finds evidence in places like Cypress Cemetery, and confronts the possibility that her father’s crimes are repeating.

The revelations come in two crashing waves. First, the mask of the “helpful reporter” slips, exposing a copycat performance bent on chaos. Then the deeper truth surfaces: Cooper, not their father, was the original killer, and Richard took the fall to protect his son. In Chloe’s kitchen, she coaxes a confession while the police listen, breaking the family’s decades-long pact of silence. The novel closes not with a miracle cure but with a choice: releasing a firefly—an image that counters the childhood cruelty of Lena Rhodes—and signaling Chloe’s first tentative step toward light after years of living in the dark.

Key Relationships

• Richard Davis: Richard is the paradox at Chloe’s core—devoted dad versus alleged murderer. The final reveal reframes his “monstrosity” as catastrophic, enabling love, tying Chloe’s story to Family Secrets and Dysfunctional Loyalty. Reconciling the father she adored with the father who lied becomes the emotional work that lets her reject the family’s cycle of concealment.

• Cooper Davis: Cooper is Chloe’s last living anchor and her earliest protector, a bond that calcifies into codependence. His manipulations (“He doesn’t know you, Chloe”) turn her survival instincts against her, isolating her until she uncovers his crimes. The betrayal is devastating precisely because he weaponized her trauma to keep himself safe.

• Daniel Briggs: Daniel represents the life Chloe wants—ordinary, soft-lit, safe. Her investigation into him, fueled by fear and Cooper’s nudges, nearly ruins that refuge. Learning Daniel once faked his sister’s death to save her complicates their bond: he’s neither a predator nor a saint, but someone who also lives with the cost of desperate choices.

• Aaron Jansen/Tyler Price: As a faux reporter who inserts himself into Chloe’s orbit, Tyler embodies Deception and Appearance vs. Reality. He’s a copycat fixated on Cooper’s murders, a parasite on others’ pain whose manipulations push Chloe toward fatal errors—and, paradoxically, toward the truth.

Defining Moments

Chloe’s arc is marked by scenes where her professional skill and personal fear collide, forcing her to choose between numbing out and acting decisively.

• The Prologue’s “monsters in plain sight”: Recasts childhood boogeymen as trusted faces, establishing her worldview and priming readers to question surfaces. Why it matters: It frames Chloe’s later suspicion as both paranoid and perceptive.
• The anniversary call from “Aaron Jansen”: The inciting incident that reopens the case and Chloe’s wounds. Why it matters: It jolts her into the investigator role she both needs and fears, and invites a predator into her confidence.
• Finding Aubrey Gravino’s earring at Cypress Cemetery: Chloe’s first concrete contribution to the new case. Why it matters: It shifts her from anxious observer to active participant, tightening the plot’s grip on her.
• The engagement party clash with Cooper: His line—“He doesn’t know you, Chloe”—plants calculated doubt about Daniel. Why it matters: Cooper uses truth about Chloe’s secrecy to sell a lie, deepening her unreliability.
• The kitchen confession: Chloe assembles the timeline, lays the trap, and records Cooper’s admission as police listen. Why it matters: She breaks the family narrative, chooses victims over blood loyalty, and begins reclaiming agency.

Essential Quotes

I thought I knew what monsters were.
As a little girl, I used to think of them as mysterious shadows lurking behind my hanging clothes, under my bed, in the woods...
No, the real monsters move in plain sight.

This reframes “monster” from a childhood fear to a domestic reality, encoding the novel’s central suspicion of appearances. It also foreshadows both Cooper’s unmasking and Chloe’s tendency to see danger in the familiar.

They’re clichés, but they’re true. And it’s okay for me to say that, because I’m a cliché, too.

Chloe’s self-awareness is sharp and unflinching; she recognizes the trope of the traumatized narrator and claims it. The line collapses stigma and insight, signaling that even “clichés” can be accurate—and deadly.

I am always on, always ready, a twenty-four-hour convenience store with a neon Open sign flickering in the darkness, trying its hardest not to die.

The metaphor captures hypervigilance as both endurance and exhaustion. Her “Open” sign suggests visibility and availability to others’ pain, but the flicker betrays how near she is to burnout and blackout.

What if your home isn’t safe? Isn’t secure?
What if the outstretched arms you collapse into on your porch steps are the same arms you should be running from?
The same arms that grabbed those girls, squeezed their necks, and buried their bodies before washing their own hands clean?

Here, intimacy and threat collapse into one image, articulating the terror of familial betrayal. It anticipates Cooper’s exposure and explains why Chloe’s instincts oscillate between seeking comfort and suspecting it.

"If he actually knew how fucking paranoid you are, do you really think he would have done that?"
"He meant well," I say. "You know he did."
"I’m sure he did, but that’s not the point. He doesn’t know you, Chloe. And you don’t know him."

Cooper’s manipulation rings with plausible concern, making it effective. He leverages Chloe’s secrecy to isolate her from Daniel, demonstrating how truth-tinted lies can become the most dangerous kind of gaslighting.