Jess

Quick Facts

Jess is the novel’s modern protagonist in the 2019 timeline, an Australian osteologist running the Vertebrate Osteology Prep Lab at the Smithsonian’s Museum Support Center in Maryland. Her story begins with a routine request to locate a missing nineteenth-century horse skeleton—an errand that propels her into the discovery of Lexington and into the orbit of Theo.

• Role: Modern scientific lens through which the past is reconstructed
• First appearance: The phone call asking her to find accession no. 121040 (the “missing horse”)
• Occupation: Osteologist; lab manager known for exacting, hands-on prep work from birds to whales
• Key relationships: Theo; Catherine Morgan; Clancy (Theo’s kelpie)

Who They Are

Jess is a scientist who believes bones are stories waiting to be articulated. She’s driven by the beauty and precision of anatomy—the “interior architecture of living things”—and she approaches the past as something that can be reassembled truthfully through material evidence. The plot transforms her from a lab-bound empiricist into an interpreter of memory and injustice: by reconstructing Lexington, she helps surface the erased lives connected to the horse, including the enslaved groom Jarret Lewis, and is forced to reckon with the modern persistence of Race, Slavery, and Systemic Racism.

Personality & Traits

Jess’s defining quality is a fierce devotion to accuracy—scientific, ethical, and personal. That discipline makes her fearless in the lab and painfully self-scrutinizing outside it. As her world widens beyond osteology, her principles harden into a moral stance that costs her her home and career but preserves her integrity.

• Scientific passion as vocation: At seven, she exhumed her dog Milo to study his skeleton—an unsettling but telling origin story that reveals curiosity stronger than taboo and a lifelong commitment to learning from remains.
• Craft ethos: She believes a perfect skeletal mount “lets a species tell its own story.” This is both her aesthetic and her ethics: technique should disappear so the subject can speak.
• Independence and competence: She lives alone, bikes long distances to work, and takes on “pungent” tasks without complaint—from degreasing whales to articulating birds—signaling stamina and a comfort with the physical realities of her field.
• Social awkwardness and self-consciousness: She frets about smelling like the lab and misreads cues; her mortifying first encounter with Theo over a bike lock exposes a blind spot she spends the novel interrogating.
• Direct, unvarnished manner: She calls her bluntness “bogan,” an Aussie plainspokenness that clashes with Washington’s polish yet grounds her work in candor over performance.
• Empathy and principle: Initially naïve about American racism, she becomes a witness who cannot unsee. Theo’s death radicalizes her empathy into action: she refuses professional prestige that asks her to tolerate injustice.
• Appearance as character: With a long ponytail twisted under a bike helmet, “delicate,” almost feline features, and “caramel” hair shot through with light strands, she often feels “scruffy and rumpled”—a look that mirrors her priorities: function over display, substance over sheen.

Character Journey

Jess begins in control: master of bone, method, and measurable facts. The Lexington assignment cracks open her insulated world, linking her craft to histories she had not been trained—or required—to see. Through Theo, she encounters the interpretive power of Art, History, and Memory, learning that every specimen is also an artifact entangled with people, economies, and violence. The personal becomes inescapably political when Theo is killed. The lab’s clean lines and catalog numbers cannot reconcile that loss; her work can articulate skeletons, not restore a life. Facing the officer’s exoneration, she rejects the fantasy of scientific neutrality, resigns, and leaves the United States. In Tasmania, she accepts a commission to articulate extinct species—an art-science practice that mourns erasure and, for Jess, becomes a form of witness. Her arc is a movement from technique to testimony: she uses the precision of her hands to honor what history tried to silence.

Key Relationships

• Theo: What begins in shame (her mistaken accusation at the bike rack) becomes an intellectual and romantic partnership. Theo widens her frame from bone to context, and together they excavate Hidden Histories and Erased Narratives. His grace after her misstep teaches her a new ethics of listening; his death makes neutrality impossible, transforming her craft into memorial practice.

• Catherine Morgan: A British equine vet who provides the crucial historical and anatomical context that identifies Lexington. Their rapport is built on mutual respect—Catherine’s veterinary expertise sharpens Jess’s osteological inquiry, and Jess’s lab rigor gives Catherine’s hunches material proof. Catherine catalyzes Jess’s shift from routine curation to consequential recovery work.

• Clancy: After Theo’s death, Jess adopts his kelpie. Clancy becomes an embodied link to Theo—a daily, tender responsibility that keeps grief companionable rather than abstract. Bringing Clancy to Australia underscores that Jess’s departure is not escape but commitment: she carries forward a life she loved.

Defining Moments

Jess’s path is marked by moments that fuse the procedural with the personal, each pushing her from technician to witness.

• The initial call to find accession no. 121040:

  • Why it matters: A mundane inventory check becomes the hinge between archives and lives, revealing how bureaucratic oversight can bury or rediscover history—and how much power resides in the hands of a conscientious curator.

• Identifying Lexington in the museum attic:

  • Why it matters: The discovery reframes a specimen as a cultural artifact, binding Jess’s craft to national mythmaking and to the human stories—enslaved labor, breeding economies—embedded in the horse’s fame.

• The bike lock incident with Theo:

  • Why it matters: Jess’s mortification exposes the gap between her self-conception and her actions. The scene foreshadows the deadly stakes of racial profiling while establishing the grace that will define their bond.

• The phone call announcing Theo’s killing:

  • Why it matters: It collapses the boundary between the controlled space of the lab and the violent, uncontrollable public sphere. From here on, her work is inseparable from mourning and moral judgment.

• Choosing to leave America for the Tasmanian commission:

  • Why it matters: Resignation is not retreat but reorientation. By articulating extinct animals, Jess weds technique to elegy, turning her skills toward a practice that names loss—of species, of justice, of Theo—and insists on memory.

Essential Quotes

Jess loved the interior architecture of living things. Ribs, the protective embrace of them, how they hold delicate organs in a lifelong hug. Eye sockets: no artisan had ever made a more elegant container for a precious thing.

This reverent language frames anatomy as art, revealing Jess’s aesthetic ethics: she sees beauty in function and responsibility in form. It foreshadows her belief that careful assembly is an act of honoring life, not just cataloging it.

She loved the term “articulate” because it was so apt: a really good mount allowed a species to tell its own story, to say what it was like when it breathed and ran, dived or soared.

“Articulate” becomes her credo. The double meaning—joining bones and giving voice—captures her journey from technical assembly to storytelling, and explains why Lexington’s mount becomes a moral as well as scientific task.

Later, she would remember that first kindness—the disciplined way he’d made the anger leave his face, the swift change of subject. It was so much more than she deserved for what had been no microaggression but blatant racism. Yet he’d let her off the hook.

Jess names her action—“blatant racism”—and centers Theo’s restraint. The memory functions as a touchstone for her growth: she learns to measure herself not by intent but by impact, a shift that underlies her later decisions.

“It’s preposterous. There’s no way Theo was assaulting anyone. And I’m positive he didn’t own a gun.”

Her incredulity is both love and evidence-based reasoning: she asserts character and fact against a narrative designed to justify violence. The line spotlights her movement from observer to advocate, refusing the convenience of official stories.

If this crazy offer was for real, she decided, she would do it. For the lost species, and for Theo.

This vow ties vocation to remembrance. The Tasmanian project becomes a memorial practice: every rib wired, every vertebra aligned a refusal to let absence be the final word—whether the absence is a vanished animal or the man she loved.