CHARACTER
Long Bright Riverby Liz Moore

Kacey Fitzpatrick

Kacey Fitzpatrick

Quick Facts

Who They Are

Fierce, funny, and volatile, Kacey Fitzpatrick is the book’s raw nerve. As a child she is a galvanizing force—boisterous, protective, magnetic—who makes their bleak house warmer by sheer presence. As an adult, she becomes the moral crucible of the novel: both victim and agent, a woman whose bad options and flawed choices collide with a city that fails her. She is the road Mickey did not take and the person Mickey cannot stop loving—a sister whose stubborn intuition and stubborn love keep cutting through denial and danger.

Personality & Traits

Kacey’s personality burns bright even as addiction dims her life. Her defining qualities—protectiveness, rebellion, perception, resilience—shape nearly every major beat of the story.

  • Boisterous and protective: As a kid she defends vulnerable classmates (Gina Brickhouse) and later decks a boy mocking Mickey’s dress after The Nutcracker, channeling rage into loyalty.
  • Rebellious and self-destructive: She tests every boundary at home, especially with Gee, then escalates to drug use that grows from thrill-seeking to compulsion.
  • Perceptive and wary: She reads people fast and right, distrusting Simon from the start when others, including Mickey, do not.
  • Resilient: Despite overdoses, street violence, and jail, she keeps trying to get clean; pregnancy and methadone mark her most sustained, purposeful commitment to change.

Character Journey

Kacey’s arc unfolds across the novel’s dual timelines. In “Then,” she moves from mischievous, fiercely loyal sister to a teenager who mistakes rebellion for freedom and soon discovers addiction’s cage. Each slip—first high, first OD, first night on the street—widens the rift with Mickey until a single, contested claim about Simon’s paternity detonates their bond. In “Now,” Kacey is mostly an absence—rumor, memory, missing person—until she reemerges sober, pregnant, and living with their father. She begins repairing what the past broke: confronting Gee’s lies, rebuilding a safer home, and quietly protecting Mickey by sharing information no one else can. By the end, she is no longer a symbol of loss but an agent of truth whose cautious hope feels earned, not sentimental.

Key Relationships

Mickey Fitzpatrick: The sisters grow up “inseparable, shadows of one another,” with Kacey pulling Mickey out into the world and Mickey guarding Kacey from it. Addiction reverses those roles; Kacey’s accusation about Simon and Mickey’s disbelief weaponize shame and pride, creating a five-year silence that only breaks when grief (Paula’s death) and danger force them back into orbit.

Gee: With Gee, love rarely looks like care. Kacey experiences her grandmother’s rules as rejection, culminating in the eviction that pushes her onto the street. The revelation that Gee hid their father’s existence—and his support—confirms Kacey’s oldest suspicion: she was never truly wanted in that house.

Paula Mulroney: Paula is Kacey’s chosen family in Kensington; they swap warnings, share risks, and watch out for each other. Paula’s murder jolts Kacey toward reconnection—her grief and fear catalyze the decision to protect Mickey again, even at personal risk.

Simon Cleare: Kacey’s early, unambiguous distrust of Simon frames him as predator long before the narrative proves it. Her claim that he fathered her baby becomes the wedge between sisters, a wound of disbelief that lingers as both private trauma and public power imbalance.

Defining Moments

Kacey’s story turns on a handful of scenes that reveal who she is—and what the city is willing to do to her.

  • The Nutcracker field trip: When a boy mocks Mickey’s dress, Kacey’s punch is impulsive justice. Why it matters: It fuses anger with loyalty, foreshadowing how her protective love can erupt destructively.
  • First overdose at sixteen: Mickey revives Kacey with Narcan and sees hatred in the faces of the newly returned. Why it matters: It exposes addiction’s terrifying logic—relief as death, revival as assault—and inaugurates the long, unequal struggle between sisters.
  • The confrontation over Simon: Kacey insists she’s pregnant by Simon; Mickey refuses to believe her. Why it matters: The disbelief fractures their bond and installs shame where trust used to be, turning Kacey’s truth into isolating silence.
  • Paula’s funeral reunion: Kacey steps in to defend Mickey from a hostile crowd moments after walking back into her life. Why it matters: Instinct overrides injury; even estranged, Kacey leads with protection, not grievance.
  • The final phone call: Kacey warns Mickey that people on the street think her partner is the killer—information that points to Eddie Lafferty. Why it matters: She chooses courage over safety, transforming from missing person to truth-teller and tipping the investigation toward justice.

Symbolism

Kacey is the mirror to Mickey’s path, a walking “what if” that personalizes the city’s opioid crisis. She embodies structural abandonment and intimate love in the same body, making policy failure impossible to separate from family failure. Haunted by the unescapable past—her mother’s addiction, Gee’s secrecy—she still insists on a future, using sobriety and impending motherhood as a bid to break the cycle. Her presence reframes salvation not as rescue by others but as a stubborn, imperfect practice of choosing life, again and again.

Essential Quotes

“Kacey, in those days, was boisterous and loud. When she was home, which she had been with less and less frequency, life was better, the house warmer and happier. Her unusual laugh—a silent, open-mouthed trembling, followed by a series of sharp, high, vocal inhalations, doubling her over as if they caused her pain—echoed off the walls.”

  • This memory captures the gravitational pull of her joy: chaotic, embodied, contagious. The detail of a laugh that “doubles her over” turns happiness into something almost painful—pleasure and hurt braided the way Kacey’s life will be.

“I told you, says Kacey. Me. Your own sister. I told you that Simon Cleare took advantage of me when I couldn’t say no. You didn’t believe me. You said I was lying.”

  • The blunt second-person indictment collapses the distance between memory and accusation. It defines the novel’s central wound: a sister’s truth discounted, and the catastrophic fallout when power protects itself and love refuses to listen.

“I trust you, she says.”

  • Small words, huge stakes. After years of doubt and damage, Kacey’s declaration is both olive branch and leap of faith, signaling that her survival now depends on rebuilding a bond she once believed was broken.

“This was the secret I learned that day: None of them want to be saved. They all want to sink backward toward the earth again, to be swallowed by the ground, to keep sleeping. There is hatred on their faces when they are roused from the dead.”

  • Though narrated by Mickey, the “secret” is written on Kacey’s body, reframing overdose and revival as opposite desires. It forces the reader to see addiction not as morality play but as altered physiology and will—where rescue can feel like violence, and love must learn a different language.