Tova Sullivan

Quick Facts

• Role: Protagonist; seventy-year-old widow of Swedish descent
• First appearance: Alone on the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium
• Home/Setting: Sowell Bay, Washington
• Occupation: Night cleaner at the aquarium
• Key relationships: Marcellus (giant Pacific octopus), Cameron Cassmore (grandson), Erik Sullivan (lost son), Ethan Mack (Shop-Way owner), the Knit-Wits (Mary Ann, Janice, Barb)

Who They Are

Tova Sullivan lives by order and routine, polishing glass and mopping floors as if neatness could hold grief at bay. Three decades after her son Erik’s disappearance, she moves through life with a carefully composed quiet—until an unlikely friendship with Marcellus the octopus cracks her isolation. Her story explores the stubborn ache of Grief and Loss and the ways tenderness sneaks in through unlikely bonds to ease Loneliness and Connection. Late in life, Tova also wrestles with what it means to keep living well, a clear-eyed meditation on Aging and Mortality.

Personality & Traits

Tova’s meticulousness is both a skill and a shield. She polishes surfaces to a shine because it’s the part of life she can control; her feelings remain under lock and key. Yet beneath the reserve is a sturdy, unshowy generosity—especially toward creatures who cannot speak for themselves.

• Meticulous and orderly: She brings her own vinegar and lemon oil to the aquarium and refuses to accept streaks, smudges, or clutter. Cleaning is the ritual that steadies her when memory threatens to overwhelm.
• Stoic and private: She keeps motherhood “inside, sunk deep in her guts like an old bullet,” rarely speaking of Erik even to her closest friends, the Knit-Wits.
• Independent and self-reliant: Though financially secure, she insists on working and declines help; accepting assistance feels perilously close to surrender.
• Empathetic, especially toward animals: She greets each creature by name on her rounds, takes in a stray cat, and recognizes distress in Marcellus long before anyone else does.
• Pragmatic and resilient: Comparing herself to the sharks who must keep swimming to breathe, she plans sensibly for a solitary future—selling her house and preparing for a retirement community when she believes no one will remain to care for her.
• Physically small, quietly durable: A “tiny older woman with a curved back and birdlike bones,” hair gone gray by forty and features “etched in clay” by fifty—yet she moves with a purposeful clip that surprises everyone.

Character Journey

At the novel’s outset, Tova survives by shrinking her world to what can be scrubbed, folded, and put away. Her bond with Marcellus breaks that pattern: she speaks to him about Erik in a way she cannot with people, and the habit of confession softens her reserve. The arrival of Cameron Cassmore as a temporary cleaner nudges open the door further, forcing her to practice kindness and trust in real time. When Marcellus uncovers the truth—that Cameron is her grandson—Tova’s life pivots. She abandons her plan to retreat into orderly solitude and chooses the messier, riskier work of family, moving from elegy to embrace—toward Found and Biological Family and a Second Chance and New Beginning.

Key Relationships

• Marcellus: More than a curiosity in a tank, Marcellus becomes Tova’s confidant and mirror—the creature who perceives the turmoil she hides and responds with his own radical acts of care. Through him, Tova learns to speak grief aloud and to accept help; he literally retrieves the missing link to her past, catalyzing her future.
• Cameron Cassmore: Initially an interruption to her solitude, Cameron becomes the living continuation of the son she lost. Discovering he is her grandson reorients Tova’s identity from bereaved mother to matriarch-in-progress, giving her purpose and someone tangible to choose, protect, and love.
• Erik Sullivan: Erik’s absence structures Tova’s every choice; she builds routines to withstand a loss that resists closure. Her arc is not about forgetting him but about letting love for the living coexist with love for the dead.
• Ethan Mack: Ethan’s gentle steadiness and practical kindness offer Tova a model of community she has long kept at arm’s length. His persistence normalizes an ordinary tenderness—coffee, conversation, rides—that makes a shared future feel possible.
• The Knit-Wits (Mary Ann, Janice, Barb): Their well-meaning bustle highlights Tova’s emotional distance; they stand just outside her fortress of composure. As Tova softens, their friendship becomes less performative and more reciprocal, proof that intimacy requires vulnerability on both sides.

Defining Moments

Tova’s turning points are small acts performed with great intention—each one loosening the grip of the past and widening the circle of her life.

• Finding Marcellus in the break room: She rescues him when he’s tangled in cords; his tentacle leaves a “silver-dollar” pattern on her arm. Why it matters: The mark becomes an emblem of connection chosen, not imposed—a physical reminder that allowing contact can heal rather than harm.
• Marcellus retrieves Erik’s ring: He returns Erik’s class ring from the wolf eel tank; the engraving—EELS: Erik Ernest Lindgren Sullivan—reveals Cameron’s identity. Why it matters: The revelation unspools decades of uncertainty, embodying the novel’s pulse of Secrets and Uncovering Truth and giving Tova a concrete future to claim.
• Releasing Marcellus into the ocean: Tova wheels him to the pier in a mop bucket and frees him into Puget Sound. Why it matters: This is Tova’s benediction and self-liberation—an enacted belief in mercy, agency, and reciprocity—echoing the move from Confinement and Freedom in both their lives.
• Deciding—and then un-deciding—to sell her house: The initial sale plan is practical armor for a solitary old age; reversing it affirms relationship over routine. Why it matters: Tova chooses risk and interdependence, accepting that love’s disorder is a better shelter than loneliness’s order.

Essential Quotes

These women have always worn motherhood big and loud on their chests, but Tova keeps hers inside, sunk deep in her guts like an old bullet. Private.

This image captures Tova’s disciplined privacy: motherhood as a wound she refuses to display. The metaphor of the “old bullet” suggests both pain and endurance—something lodged too deep to remove, managed by silence and control.

Tova has always felt more than a bit of empathy for the sharks, with their never-ending laps around the tank. She understands what it means to never be able to stop moving, lest you find yourself unable to breathe.

The shark metaphor translates grief into motion: survival as perpetual activity. Cleaning, lists, routines—these are not quirks but respiration, the way Tova keeps herself from drowning in sorrow.

"I have a grandson."

A simple sentence detonates decades of stasis. In four words, Tova’s identity shifts from a mother without a child to a grandmother with a future; the line traces the novel’s pivot from isolation to connection and replaces specter with lineage.

"You don’t recover. Not all the way. But you do move on. You have to."

This is Tova’s philosophy, distilled. It rejects the myth of full recovery while insisting on ethical forward motion—an adult acceptance that grief is permanent, but paralysis is not.