Richard Davis

Quick Facts

• Role: Incarcerated father of the protagonist; the town’s presumed serial killer; the story’s hidden protector
• First appearance: In childhood memories and news footage that define the case in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana
• Status: Imprisoned for two decades after confessing to six murders
• Key relationships: daughter Chloe Davis; son Cooper Davis; wife Mona Davis; Mona’s lover Bert Rhodes

Who They Are

Richard Davis is the paradox at the heart of the novel: a man branded a monster whose gentleness—his voice, his outstretched arms—once embodied safety for his children. The town sees a serial killer; his family remembers a father who tucked in his kids and wrote stories at bedtime. The narrative ultimately reveals that both images are masks—one public, one private—concealing a grim truth about paternal love warped by fear. Richard becomes the clearest lens on the book’s core preoccupations with Family Secrets and Dysfunctional Loyalty and Deception and Appearance vs. Reality: he allows himself to be the villain so the actual villain remains hidden, a choice that saves his son while destroying everyone else.

Personality & Traits

Richard’s character is filtered through Chloe’s evolving, often unreliable memory, which turns him from guardian to ghoul and, finally, to a tragic protector. His defining trait is a love strong enough to become self-erasure. He curates his own monstrous image—downcast eyes behind fractured glasses, a trembling confession—so that the world will stop looking past him.

• Loving father, concretely expressed: He teaches Chloe to ride a bike, tucks her in, and writes bedtime stories, the mundane tenderness that makes his later “confession” feel impossible.
• Protector who plants fear: He enforces strict curfews and warns about darkness and strangers, instilling vigilance that ironically feeds Chloe’s lifelong anxiety.
• Apparent cowardice: On television, he speaks of a “darkness” within, which Chloe reads as self-pity rather than accountability, deepening her revulsion.
• Self-sacrificing loyalty: His confession covers for Cooper, a deliberate trade of his life and reputation to shield his son from the death penalty and his family from public annihilation.
• Silent endurance: Twenty years of prison without protest reframes him as a man committed to a devastating choice, not a predator evading blame.
• Public image as narrative weapon: The broken glasses, cuffed hands, and cast-down gaze create a portrait of guilt that he allows—and needs—the town to believe.

Character Journey

Richard doesn’t change so much as the light on him does. At first, he is the fixed point of Chloe’s trauma: the handcuffed killer who shatters her childhood and cements her mistrust. Memory and media collaborate to harden this image—the dirt-smeared shovel, the televised tears, the resigned “Be good.” The climax rewrites each moment; the shovel scene becomes a frantic attempt to find and manage what Cooper has done, and the “confession” reveals itself as an act of paternal triage. The result is a radical inversion: Richard is not the monster but the man who chose to look like one so the real monster could pass unseen. This reversal doesn’t absolve him—his “protection” enables further violence—but it renders him tragic rather than purely evil, forcing a complete re-reading of the past.

Key Relationships

• Chloe Davis: Richard is the axis of Chloe’s life, the origin of her career in psychology, her hypervigilance, and her mistrust. She builds her identity around surviving a father’s betrayal—only to learn she’s been surviving a story he wrote to protect someone else, leaving her grief-stricken and unmoored by the revelation.
• Cooper Davis: Richard’s choices are entirely calibrated around his son. He redirects the state’s gaze onto himself, pleads for goodness with a final “Be good,” and bears the legal and moral weight that should have been Cooper’s. His love is absolute—and catastrophically enabling.
• Mona Davis: Knowing Mona’s affair with Bert Rhodes and her knowledge of Cooper’s crimes, Richard expands his confession into a shield for his wife as well. His decision keeps the family’s private horror from public consumption but contributes to Mona’s breakdown and catatonic state—proof that secrecy can be as annihilating as exposure.

Defining Moments

Richard’s story unfolds in shards—memories, images, and a confession—each later reinterpreted. Together, they map a man choosing obliteration as an act of love.

• The Arrest

  • What happens: Police flood the Davis home; Richard is subdued, glasses cracking, and he tells his children, “Be good.”
  • Why it matters: The scene brands him as a monster in Chloe’s mind; the phrase later reads as a desperate directive to Cooper, revealing Richard’s intent to intervene even in defeat.

• The Shovel at Night

  • What happens: Chloe sees Richard emerge from the woods, dirty, with a shovel.
  • Why it matters: For years, it functions as her personal “smoking gun.” Reframed, it becomes evidence of Richard’s grim damage control—searching for victims to protect his son and control the fallout.

• The Televised Confession

  • What happens: Richard speaks of a “darkness” inside him, weeping on camera.
  • Why it matters: The spectacle cements his guilt in the court of public opinion and in Chloe’s heart. Only later does it read as performance with a purpose: absorbing the story so no one looks at Cooper.

• Two Decades of Silence

  • What happens: Richard never recants or redirects blame, even as time corrodes his family.
  • Why it matters: His endurance underscores that this was a chosen sacrifice, not a panicked lie, and complicates the morality of love that protects evil.

• The Final Revelation

  • What happens: The truth surfaces—Richard confessed to shield Cooper from the death penalty and spare the family from exposure.
  • Why it matters: The novel’s moral center flips. Richard becomes a tragic emblem of loyalty turned lethal, collapsing the boundary between protector and perpetrator-by-proxy.

Essential Quotes

I would trip on my shoelaces, scramble up my front steps, and slam into the warmth of my father’s outstretched arms, his breath hot in my ear, whispering: I’ve got you, I’ve got you. His fingers would grab fistfuls of my hair, and my lungs would sting from the influx of air. My heart would crash hard against my chest as a single word formed in my mind: safety.

This memory anchors Richard’s duality. The sensory detail—warmth, breath, the word “safety”—contradicts his public image and makes the later confession feel like an unsolvable riddle. The novel asks readers to hold both truths: a father who felt like refuge, and a man who chose to look like a predator.

I remember how his eyes locked intently on mine, unflinching and focused. Mine, then Cooper’s. “Be good,” he said.

At first, the line reads as paternal platitude; in retrospect, it is a final plea and coded instruction to Cooper. The eye contact—Chloe, then Cooper—quietly signals where his mind is in that moment: triage, not surrender.

“I have a darkness inside of me,” he said at last. “A darkness that comes out at night.”

The confession is both literal and theatrical. Chloe interprets it as cowardice and self-mythologizing, which the town eagerly accepts. Later, it functions as a shield—he narrates the darkness so the real darkness remains unnamed.

“It drew me in, it swallowed me whole. Sometimes I think it might be the devil himself.”

By externalizing evil as a force that “swallowed” him, Richard performs the archetype of the possessed killer. The language is melodramatic enough to win public certainty—and, crucially, to redirect the narrative away from Cooper—while revealing how stories about evil can be shaped to protect the guilty and mislead the innocent.