Ryan Blanchard

Quick Facts

• Role: Eighteen-year-old son of Nora and Al Blanchard, older brother to Faith; becomes a prime suspect in Avery Wooler’s disappearance after a false witness report.
• First appearance: Early in the novel as a handsome, athletic teen already marked by a recent drug possession charge and ongoing community service.
• Age and look: “Tall, well-built, good-looking,” a kid with “so much potential” whose image clashes painfully with his record.
• Key relationships: His anxious mother, Nora Blanchard; detached father, Al Blanchard; furious accuser, Erin Wooler; malicious witness, Marion Cooke; lead investigator, Detective Gully.

Who They Are

Ryan Blanchard is the novel’s most effective red herring: a good-looking, restless teen whose past mistake makes him instantly legible as “the type” people fear. His arc exposes how a single bad decision can render someone vulnerable to public panic, institutional pressure, and family doubt. As he’s pulled into the search for Avery, then recast as a suspect, Ryan becomes a study in how a community metabolizes fear through scapegoating—an embodiment of Deceit and Lies and the brutal gap between Appearance vs. Reality. He’s also collateral damage in an adult vendetta, swept up by Revenge and Obsession that has nothing to do with him.

Personality & Traits

Ryan’s defining tension is between who he is and how he’s read. He’s anxious and ashamed, but he also wants to do right—volunteering to search for a missing child before the narrative hardens against him. His detachment from his parents is less rebellion than self-recrimination: he believes he’s failed them and half-accepts the punishment that follows.

• Anxious, easily overwhelmed: Petrified during questioning, he feels “sick and frightened” and asks for a lawyer the instant the accusation lands—evidence of both fear and a dawning self-protectiveness.
• Distant from family: He senses a “chasm” between himself and his parents and blames himself, internalizing their disappointment as proof that he is not who they believed.
• Restless and stuck: With friends off at college, he’s back home doing community service; the “itch to get out of Stanhope” underscores a stalled coming-of-age.
• Initially altruistic: Before suspicion falls, he immediately volunteers to help search for Avery—an impulse that reveals his decency before it’s eclipsed by rumor.
• The burden of “potential”: Being a “good-looking boy” with “so much potential” sharpens the tragedy; the better he looks on paper, the harder the fall when assumptions attach to his record.

Character Journey

Ryan starts as a familiar figure: the sullen teen with a blotchy file, grinding through community service while yearning to leave. He briefly steps into maturity when he volunteers for the search, signaling a desire to contribute rather than retreat. The false witness report detonates that trajectory. Overnight, he’s yanked from the margins into a nightmare of late-night interrogations, a neighbor’s rage in his living room, and a public arrest that brands him. The most devastating blow isn’t procedural—it’s intimate. He catches hesitation in his parents’ eyes and realizes he may no longer be presumed innocent at home. Even after he’s released when Avery is found, the exoneration can’t unwind the humiliation, fear, and erosion of trust. Ryan’s arc becomes less about clearing his name than about what suspicion leaves behind: the knowledge that credibility is fragile and that love can falter when a community chooses a convenient story.

Key Relationships

• Nora Blanchard: With Nora Blanchard, Ryan longs for comfort but finds worry sharpened into doubt. Her secret guilt and anxiety make her fierce in his defense yet hesitant in her belief—a contradiction he senses, deepening the “chasm” he already feels and teaching him that love can waver under pressure.

• Al Blanchard: With Al Blanchard, detachment is the default. Al’s quiet resentments and Ryan’s past charge curdle into a readiness to believe the worst. Their distance isn’t loud; it’s the quiet kind that leaves Ryan “there but not there” in his own home.

• Erin Wooler: Erin Wooler channels terror into accusation, confronting and physically attacking Ryan. The scene turns private grief into public spectacle, fixing Ryan as the face of suspicion and showing how a mother’s anguish can legitimize communal blame.

• Marion Cooke: Marion Cooke never meets Ryan in any meaningful way—she doesn’t need to. Her lie uses him as a proxy to injure others, proving how revenge can reshape reality for bystanders and how a believable story can nearly erase a person’s life.

Defining Moments

Ryan’s turning points map the swift collapse of presumption-of-innocence into stigma.

• Volunteering for the search: He decides to join the search party for Avery before suspicion falls on him.
  • Why it matters: Establishes his instinct to help and the baseline of his character before rumor distorts him.
• The midnight interrogation: Woken and questioned by Detective Gully and Detective Bledsoe without a solid alibi.
  • Why it matters: Shows how fear and procedure can corner a teenager into looking guilty, and how quickly the narrative turns.
• Erin’s confrontation at home: Erin storms in, demanding, “What did you do with her?” in front of witnesses and the press.
  • Why it matters: Converts private suspicion into public identity. After this, Ryan isn’t just a person—he’s a headline.
• The arrest: After Marion’s statement, he’s cuffed and jailed.
  • Why it matters: His lowest point; the image of the handcuffs marks a rite of passage twisted into humiliation and terror.
• Exoneration and aftermath: Released once Avery is found alive.
  • Why it matters: Freedom doesn’t restore reputation or trust; the experience rewires how he sees his family, his town, and himself.

Essential Quotes

His father is on the periphery, there but not there. His dad is . . . detached. But Ryan isn’t as close to his mother these days either. There’s a chasm between Ryan and both his parents, and Ryan knows it’s his own doing. He hasn’t turned out to be the son they thought he was.

This passage captures Ryan’s self-blame and the quiet disintegration of familial intimacy. The “periphery” image foreshadows how easily he can be pushed from son to suspect—already marginal at home, he’s ready to be marginalized by the town.

“We have a witness who saw Avery Wooler getting into your car, at around four thirty Tuesday afternoon.” Ryan feels like he might pass out. He says, “I want a lawyer.”

His immediate request for a lawyer signals both terror and a hard-learned instinct for self-preservation. The contrast between the police’s certainty (“We have a witness”) and Ryan’s physical reaction frames the power imbalance that defines his ordeal.

“She was seen getting into your car,” Erin cries, her eyes wild. She comes up very close to him and cries, more loudly, “What did you do with her?”

Erin’s grief translates into moral certainty, and proximity becomes intimidation. The public nature of the confrontation transforms allegation into social fact; after this scene, community perception hardens against him.

“My client denies any involvement with the missing girl. She did not get in his car that day. He is innocent.”

The lawyer’s formal rebuttal underscores how Ryan’s voice is displaced by representation once the machine of accusation starts. The legal language asserts truth, but it can’t dispel the narrative momentum of a convincing lie—a central irony of Ryan’s story.