CHARACTER
Ask For Andreaby Noelle W. Ihli

Brecia Collier

Brecia Collier

Quick Facts

  • Role: One of the novel’s three central protagonists; the first of James Carson’s victims to haunt him
  • Status: Deceased; becomes a vigilant, interfering ghost focused on justice
  • First appearance: Chapter 2 (murder and immediate awakening as a spirit)
  • Key relationships: James Carson (killer and quarry), Skye and Meghan (fellow victims and sisters-in-arms), April Carson and daughters Emma and Kimmie (endangered family she tries to protect)
  • Range: Follows James from Colorado to Utah to Idaho
  • Appearance: Alive—long dark hair, bloodshot hazel eyes, soft chambray pajamas, chipped peach toenail polish. As a ghost—an unharmed, cleaned version of herself, solid and present without being alive.

Who She Is

Bold, funny, and unblinking, Brecia Collier is the story’s spear-tip of rage and resolve. Her murder—two years before the main timeline—sparks a mission that moves from personal retaliation to collective action, mapping onto the themes of Vengeance and Post-Mortem Justice and the healing force of an Afterlife and Sisterhood. Brecia starts as a lone witness to James Carson’s predation and becomes a guardian voice, refusing to let his violence remain unseen.

Personality & Traits

Brecia’s voice blends bite and care: she weaponizes humor to keep herself intact, then channels her fury into protection. As she masters the thin levers a ghost can pull—electricity, movement through cracks, dreams—her wit becomes strategy, and her rage becomes a shield for others.

  • Sarcastic, razor-observant: Even while dying, she skewers James’s “Joaquin Phoenix beard” that drops him “from a comfortable nine to a very solid three” (Chapter 2). The joke is control—narrative power reclaimed at the moment he steals everything else.
  • Vengeful and tenacious: She chooses to haunt James immediately, shadowing him across states to thwart his life and expose his pattern of harm. Her relentless pursuit fuels the book’s investigative engine.
  • Protective: Her focus widens from revenge to defense—she urgently tries to warn Nicole during a date, and later extends her vigilance to April and the Carson girls as she recognizes the household as another crime scene.
  • Resourceful: She learns to slip through small openings and discovers that emotion-charged energy lets her short out devices—tactical skills she refines to interfere with James’s grooming and cover-ups.

Character Journey

Brecia’s arc unfolds from solitary rage to shared purpose. After awakening beside her own body (Chapter 2), she binds herself to James, treating his daily life as evidence and opportunity. Watching him hunt through MatchStrike reframes her mission: saving Nicole (Chapter 14) becomes as urgent as punishing him, pulling Brecia into the broader fight against Predation and Violence Against Women. Meeting Skye and then Meghan ends her isolation and teaches her to pool strength rather than white-knuckle it alone. By the final confrontation, Brecia is not just a haunting—she’s an organizer, leveraging dreams, electricity, and sisterhood to protect April and help bring James to justice. Her victory is not simply punitive; it’s communal.

Key Relationships

  • James Carson: Brecia’s murderer is also her obsession and case file. Their “relationship” is a grim reversal of dating: he performs normalcy while she documents and disrupts. Through her eyes, James personifies Deception and Duality—loving husband by day, calculating predator by night—and Brecia becomes the counterforce that refuses to let his two selves stay separate.
  • Skye and Meghan: Finding the other victims transforms Brecia’s haunting into a sisterhood. Initially the veteran ghost, she shares tactics and grief; soon, they operate as equals, combining abilities and courage to achieve what none could alone—credible warnings, coordinated interference, and finally, escape and accountability.
  • April Carson (and Emma, Kimmie): Brecia’s contempt for April’s “blissfully, doggedly unaware” life (Chapter 5) gives way to protective empathy as she witnesses emotional abuse and coercive control. She comes to see April and the girls as survivors-in-progress, channeling her power into their safety and awakening.

Defining Moments

Brecia’s most pivotal beats chart her shift from avenger to protector—and show how a ghost learns to act on a world that can’t see her.

  • Realizing she’s dead (Chapter 2): She stands while her body lies on the pavement. Why it matters: establishes the rules of her afterlife and launches her choice to haunt rather than pass on.
  • First spark of power (Chapter 5): Her rage blacks out James’s computer. Why it matters: proof she can alter the physical world, giving her a tool to sabotage his hunting.
  • Trying to save Nicole (Chapter 14): She pushes past rage to prevention, attempting to warn a potential victim. Why it matters: her mission broadens from personal vengeance to active protection.
  • Meeting Skye (Chapter 29): “Are you dead?” is met with recognition in the Carson house. Why it matters: ends two years of isolation and activates the strategy of solidarity.
  • The final push (Chapters 42–51): Brecia helps engineer April’s escape—whispering warnings, stoking necessary fear, coordinating with Meghan and Skye. Why it matters: their collective action precipitates James’s capture and translates haunting into justice.

Essential Quotes

  • “In hindsight, that was when I decided I was going to haunt him. I studied him from the passenger seat while he drove. His amber eyes, black in the darkness of the car, stayed fixed on the road while we made the twenty-minute drive back to his place.” Analysis: The decision is intimate and strategic: she converts a car ride into a vow, binding her afterlife to observation and interference. The gaze flips the power dynamic—he drives, but she directs the narrative.

  • “The anger that had been simmering inside me for the past three days bubbled into something white-hot as I watched him close the incognito browser and put in headphones. If I still had a body, it would have been shaking. Since I didn’t, the whole world sort of turned fuzzy and charged. That’s when I heard a quiet pop, and his computer screen went dark.” Analysis: Emotion becomes electricity. Brecia learns her grief and fury are not just feelings but force—an ethic of intervention expressed as literal power outage.

  • “I leaned in with her, pressing my ghost lips closer and closer until I was pretty sure I was actually inside her ear canal. ‘Listen to me, okay? Do not keep drinking. You’re not safe. This drink isn’t safe. He isn’t safe.’” Analysis: Brecia reframes haunting as caretaking. The intimacy of the whisper—inside the ear—underscores how protection requires proximity, insistence, and a willingness to be intrusive when danger is imminent.

  • “‘I’m so sorry,’ I told her in the dark car. There were no tears. I didn’t have those anymore, and neither did she. But the electric weight of the sadness in the car reached even the lone streetlight at the corner of the impound lot that had just blinked on in the storm rolling over the hills. ‘I tried so hard to stop him. I followed him everywhere. Like his shadow. In the end, I couldn’t do anything to stop it from happening.’” Analysis: This apology acknowledges the limits of one ghost against systemic cruelty, while the “electric weight” links sorrow to the power she wields. It’s a credo of the book: witness matters, and so does solidarity—especially when victory is partial and grief remains.