Paula Mulroney

Quick Facts

• Role: Loyal best friend and street confidante of Kacey Fitzpatrick; informal bridge to Michaela 'Mickey' Fitzpatrick and the Avenue
• First appearance: “Then” sections as a tall, strong, self-possessed teenager in Kensington
• Key relationships: Kacey (sisterlike partnership), Mickey (fraught trust across the cop–community divide)

Who They Are

Bold, practical, and unsentimental, Paula Mulroney embodies the Avenue’s unspoken codes: protect your own, keep your head down, and never forget who holds power. As a teen, she’s an “Amazon” presence—physically strong and unflinching. As an adult, she shows the street’s toll—on crutches in the rain, jacket soaked through—yet her instincts remain sharp. She is both conduit and gatekeeper: the friend who once helped Mickey reach Kacey and the wary witness who later withholds, then risks everything to share what she knows. Through Paula, the novel exposes the intimate tangle of Family Bonds and Dysfunction, the brutal gravity of Addiction and Its Consequences, and the corrosive fog of Moral Ambiguity that shrouds Kensington.

Personality & Traits

Paula lives by a fiercely local ethic: loyalty first, survival always. She’s the kind of person who makes the call in a crisis and carries a body if she has to—then shuts down when institutions come asking questions. Her pragmatism reads as toughness; her distrust is hard-earned wisdom.

• Loyal and protective: She pages Mickey during Kacey’s first overdose and physically carries Kacey out to safety, honoring the sisters’ bond even when others wouldn’t.
• Brave and level-headed: In the overdose scene, Mickey “marvel[s]” at Paula’s swiftness and certainty; under pressure, she acts before fear can.
• Street-smart and cynical: Raised amid dealing and hustling, she understands who’s dangerous, how rumor travels, and what information can cost—knowledge that lets her identify the killer where cops cannot.
• Wary of authority: “I don’t talk to the police” isn’t defiance for its own sake; it’s a survival rule forged by years of being unprotected and over-policed.
• Resilient yet vulnerable: The crutches and soaked denim jacket mark how the Avenue erodes bodies; still, she shows up, informed and alert, for the people she claims as hers.

Character Journey

Paula’s arc is less transformation than revelation. In the “Then” chapters, she’s the competent teen who steps in where adults fail, a “bad influence” only in the sense that she refuses respectability politics. In the present, she’s worn down but unbroken, a woman who has learned to ration trust. She shifts from early ally to guarded informant—and finally to a target—because her knowledge threatens men with badges. Her murder turns private fear into public proof: the killer is one of “their own.” In story terms, Paula is the hinge—her courage catalyzes the investigation’s turn inward; her death drives home the costs of speaking up in a landscape where power hides behind a uniform.

Key Relationships

• Kacey Fitzpatrick: With Kacey, Paula lives a street-level sisterhood—mutual watchfulness, shared corners, and quick triage when crisis hits. She protects Kacey in ways that blur friendship and kinship, at once enabling survival and revealing how love can’t outmuscle addiction’s pull.
• Michaela “Mickey” Fitzpatrick: As teens, Paula is the bridge between the sisters; as adults, she’s the wall. Mickey’s badge makes her both resource and risk, and Paula enforces that boundary until the stakes force a breach. When Paula finally points Mickey toward the killer, it’s a brief rekindling of trust—paid for at the highest price.

Defining Moments

Paula’s choices are decisive, physical, and costly; each moment clarifies her code and the world she inhabits.

• Rescuing Kacey (Then): She pages Mickey, leads her to the overdose site, and lifts Kacey off the bed herself.
  • Why it matters: It establishes Paula as action-first and fiercely protective, the rare friend who respects the sisters’ bond and assumes responsibility when adults abdicate.
• The Revelation (Now): Shown security footage, Paula recognizes the suspect as a cop known on the Avenue and tells Mickey.
  • Why it matters: Her street intelligence cracks the case where procedure can’t, exposing institutional rot and forcing the investigation to turn inward.
• Paula’s Murder: After speaking up, Paula becomes the killer’s final victim, triggering scrutiny that ultimately names Eddie Lafferty.
  • Why it matters: Her death is both evidence and indictment—proof that women who can identify predators are hunted, and that silence is enforced by violence.

Essential Quotes

"Don’t tell your grandmom, though," said Paula, "in case I’m wrong."

Paula tempers urgency with discretion. She’s trying to protect Kacey without detonating family panic, revealing her instinct to manage risk inside intimate networks rather than escalate to authorities—a hallmark of her approach throughout.

I marvel now at her bravery, her levelheadedness, the swiftness and sureness of her movements—she put an arm under Kacey’s knees and an arm under her shoulders and brought her up off the bed.

Through Mickey’s retrospective awe, the novel frames Paula as the adult in the room long before adulthood. The physicality of the rescue underlines her competence and foreshadows her later role as the person who moves when others hesitate.

"Look," she says. "I don’t talk to the police."

A boundary drawn in six words. The line speaks to Paula’s survival logic and to the rupture between her world and Mickey’s—their shared history colliding with an institution that has never protected Paula’s community.

"That’s one of your guys, Mick," she says. "That’s a cop."

This is the hinge of the mystery and the culmination of Paula’s street acuity. She names what the system refuses to see, collapsing Mickey’s professional and personal spheres—and sealing her own fate by making the invisible visible.