Opening
Two timelines entwine as a patrol officer’s routine shift fractures into a personal crisis and a childhood bond begins to splinter. The present raises the specter of a serial killer; the past shows how love, duty, and neglect shape two sisters on a collision course with loss.
What Happens
Chapter 5: NOW
Michaela 'Mickey' Fitzpatrick starts her shift by asking to end her partnership with Eddie Lafferty. Her sergeant agrees with barely a glance, and that small bureaucratic shrug frees her to work solo again. In the quiet of her patrol car, she calls her son, Thomas, slipping briefly out of cop mode. The break ends when Detective Davis Nguyen gathers officers to announce two young women—likely sex workers—have been found strangled in vacant lots. He adds they’re reopening the unidentified body on the Gurney Street tracks from a month earlier (Chapter 1-2 Summary), suggesting a serial killer is hunting in Kensington.
A “low hum of anxiety” starts in Mickey. She realizes she hasn’t seen her sister, Kacey Fitzpatrick, since that first body, and the unspoken truce between them—watching without speaking—suddenly looks like a trap. Years ago, her former partner, Truman Dawes, told her that patrolling was her way of keeping tabs on Kacey; he was right. Mickey breaks from her assigned zone and heads for Kensington Avenue, where Kacey usually works. She ducks into Alonzo’s corner store, a familiar lookout where she has often surveilled her sister without being seen.
From the counter, she stares at the avenue and seethes at the “johns,” anger she knows can spill into force. Alonzo interrupts to offer condolences: he’s heard Kacey is missing. He says Kacey’s friend, Paula Mulroney, told him Kacey hasn’t been around in a month or more. Mickey stays professional, but the news locks her fear into fact. In a district where a killer targets women who look like her sister, Kacey shifts from estranged to missing.
Chapter 6: THEN
The narrative flashes back to the sisters’ childhood, where Mickey trusts in discipline and responsibility while Kacey leans on the story of a hard life. Mickey alone remembers their mother, Lisa—warm, young, loving—which makes losing her to an overdose at five a wound that never closes. Their grandmother Gee, stricken and severe, raises them, her bitterness aimed at their father, Daniel (Thomas Fitzpatrick), whom she blames for her daughter’s addiction and for disappearing.
After their mother’s death and their father’s abandonment, Mickey becomes a third parent. She invents happy memories to shelter Kacey from the truth, and their bond turns fierce and complicated. In one furious moment, Mickey weaponizes it, telling Kacey their mother “loved her more.” The girls grow up inseparable in Gee’s frugal rowhouse, sharing a room and a secret cache beneath a floorboard that holds their notes and treasures—proof that, for a while, they are each other’s whole world.
Things change when Gee enrolls them in the Police Athletic League. Fourteen-year-old Mickey falls for a young officer, Simon Cleare, who teaches her chess, steers her toward books and films, and becomes the axis of her attention. As Mickey’s focus narrows to Simon, Kacey feels the loss and drifts toward a new crowd led by Paula. At thirteen, she starts using pills and pulls away. The hiding spot under the floorboard, once full of sisterly notes, now holds OxyContin. At sixteen, Kacey overdoses for the first time. Panicked, Mickey runs to Simon; behind the PAL building, he holds her, and she clings to him like a savior—never seeing how her devotion to him helped widen the distance between her and her sister.
Character Development
The present tests the armor Mickey has built since childhood, while the past shows how that armor formed—and how a single relationship shifted the center of her life away from her sister.
- Mickey Fitzpatrick: A “parentified” protector who channels guilt into control. In the present, duty yields to fear for Kacey; in the past, seriousness and intelligence become survival tools—and vulnerabilities when Simon’s validation replaces Kacey’s needs.
- Kacey Fitzpatrick: Emotionally exposed, reliant on Mickey’s narratives about their mother. Feeling abandoned, she turns to peers and pills, her rebellion doubling as a plea to be seen.
- Simon Cleare: A bright, stabilizing mentor for Mickey—chessboards, reading lists, attention—whose perfection registers as threat to Kacey and foreshadows trouble beneath his clean surface.
- Gee: A caretaker hardened by grief and poverty. Love sits under layers of resentment at a son-in-law who vanished and a world that offered no rescue.
Themes & Symbols
These chapters anchor the novel’s exploration of Family Bonds and Dysfunction. The sisters’ codependency begins as protection and turns into pressure; when Mickey’s first love arrives, the bond frays. The past refuses to stay past: the present investigation is driven by the very fault lines laid down in childhood, fulfilling the logic of The Unescapable Past. Mickey’s career becomes the extension of a sister’s promise, while Kacey’s disappearance becomes the invoice for years of silence and distance.
Addiction and Its Consequences operates generationally. A mother’s overdose, a father’s absence, a teenager’s pills—each step extends the family’s harm. Secrets and betrayal thread through the sisters’ story: invented memories, a weaponized confession of maternal favoritism, hidden pills, and an emotional substitution in Simon that Kacey experiences as abandonment.
Symbol: The Hiding Spot
- The hollow beneath the floorboard begins as a sanctuary for shared notes and dreams—an intimate archive of sisterhood.
- When it becomes a stash for OxyContin, the sanctuary curdles into a vault of secrets, marking the exact point where safety tips into risk and closeness into concealment.
Key Quotes
“a low hum of anxiety”
- The phrase captures the novel’s atmospheric dread and Mickey’s embodied fear. It also signals how vigilance—her defining trait—can harden into panic when the danger becomes personal.
“johns”
- Mickey’s contempt compresses decades of exploitation into a single word. Her anger at buyers of sex fuels both her protective instincts and her tendency toward excessive force, complicating her role as cop, sister, and witness.
“loved her more”
- Mickey’s confession turns tenderness into a blade. It reveals how love, in this family, doubles as leverage—and how guilt calcifies into the need to repair what can’t be undone.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
Chapter 5 pivots the novel from routine policing to an intimate search, tying a potential serial killer to a sister’s disappearance and collapsing Mickey’s professional and private lives. Chapter 6 supplies the undertow that pulls Mickey forward: a childhood defined by loss, a bond defined by duty, and a choice—Simon over Kacey—that echoes into the present. Together, the dual timelines build suspense and emotional clarity, showing how the case on Mickey’s desk is the reckoning she has been postponing since she first promised to keep her sister safe.