Claire

Quick Facts

• Role: Antagonist; the woman called Claire is actually Amber Taylor, the narrator’s childhood friend who assumed her identity after a house fire
• First appearance: At the hospital bedside of her “sister,” Amber Reynolds
• Also known as: Amber Taylor (childhood identity)
• Key relationships: Amber Reynolds (narrator/original Claire), Paul Reynolds, Edward Clarke, Madeline Frost
• Central themes: Deception and Unreliable Narration, Identity and Self-Perception, Manipulation and Control, Sisterhood and Toxic Relationships

Who They Are

At first, Claire reads as the narrator’s polished, attentive younger sister—ever-present at the hospital, outwardly concerned, seemingly perfect. But the novel slowly exposes a far darker truth: she is Amber Taylor, the narrator’s childhood best friend who took the name “Claire” after a fire killed the original Claire’s parents. The identity swap fuses the girls into an enmeshed, lifelong bind that masquerades as care while functioning as possession. Claire’s immaculate exterior doubles as a mask and a method—her beauty and composure help sell the lie, keep control, and rewrite who belongs to whom.

Her designer skinny jeans look as though they’ve been sprayed on... Everything about her appearance is neat, tidy, controlled. We couldn't look more different. (p. 30)

Her curated look—“neat, tidy, controlled”—is character, not costume: a visual thesis for a life built on fabrication, vigilance, and domination.

Personality & Traits

Claire’s traits seem contradictory—devoted yet destructive, affectionate yet annihilating—but they all serve a single aim: to keep the narrator exclusively hers. The “two peas in a pod” refrain turns from cute to coercive, a mantra that justifies erasing boundaries, histories, even names.

• Manipulative and controlling: She engineers major life events, from dismantling the narrator’s relationship with Edward Clarke via forged complaints to steering her career toward Coffee Morning to fuel revenge against Madeline Frost. Control is not a tactic; it’s her organizing principle.
• Possessive and jealous: Anyone who competes for the narrator’s loyalty—especially Paul Reynolds—becomes a threat to eliminate. Her vigilance at the hospital feels less like care than surveillance.
• Deceptive: Her adult life is a sustained performance as “Amber Taylor.” Lies about whereabouts, intentions, and interventions keep everyone off-balance while she shapes outcomes behind the scenes.
• Ruthless and volatile: The narrator notices “a flash of danger” in her eyes (p. 31). When challenged—over the diaries, the pregnancy, the past—she pivots to intimidation, culminating in the Christmas Day drive.
• Obsessive: “Two peas in a pod” (p. 77) hardens into doctrine. What begins as companionship becomes ownership—an insistence that their identities, choices, and futures must be one.

Character Journey

Claire does not evolve; she is revealed. The reader meets a doting sister, then discovers the diaries of “Taylor,” a lonely child who idealizes and then annexes her friend. Each memory reframes the present until the final turn confirms the architecture of the lie: the narrator is the original Claire, and “Claire” is Amber Taylor. From childhood fixation to adult impersonation, her methods scale but never shift—she isolates, imitates, and imposes. The car crash exposes the endgame of her obsession, and the “After” section mirrors the fire that birthed their bond, showing how a relationship forged in trauma can end in the same flames that began it.

Key Relationships

• Amber Reynolds (the narrator/original Claire): Their relationship is both origin and engine of the plot. The childhood identity swap binds them in a feedback loop of debt and domination—Claire frames control as protection, while the narrator is held by love, fear, and the weight of shared secrets. The diaries, the pregnancy, and the final drive reveal how intimacy, once weaponized, becomes captivity.

• Paul Reynolds: To Claire, Paul is competition for the narrator’s allegiance. She needles their marriage from the sidelines, seeding suspicion and leveraging the diaries once Paul discovers them. Her chilling line—“He read them and now the situation needs to be dealt with”—exposes how she translates private revelations into strategic threats.

• Edward Clarke: As teenagers and young adults, Edward represents independence for the narrator. Claire’s anonymous letters to his medical school sabotage the romance and publicly diminish him, proving she’ll wound others (and the narrator’s future) to preserve her monopoly.

• Madeline Frost: Claire fixates on Madeline’s inheritance of the original Claire’s family home, turning old grief into a new vendetta. By pushing the narrator toward Coffee Morning, she reframes professional ambition as payback, pulling the workplace plot into her personal war.

Defining Moments

Claire’s story is a series of unmaskings—each scene peeling back polish to reveal coercion.

• The Christmas Market confession: She admits to writing threatening letters about Edward, recasting an old breakup as an act of sabotage. Why it matters: the revelation proves her long game, reaching years into the past to isolate the narrator.

• Hospital visits: Her bedside presence reads as devotion until her barbed exchanges with Paul and cool crisis-management tone (“needs to be dealt with”) betray calculation. Why it matters: the hospital, a space of care, becomes her control room.

• The car crash (Christmas Day): She confronts the narrator about the diaries and the pregnancy, then says “I love you” before impact. Why it matters: the ambiguity—tenderness or threat?—captures the core paradox of her love: affection indistinguishable from annihilation.

• The final revelation and fire (“After”): The narrator exposes the identity swap and sets a parallel blaze. Why it matters: the circle closes where it began—fire as both origin myth and reckoning—showing that stolen identities invite catastrophic symmetry.

Essential Quotes

"Look at the two of you, like two peas in a pod." (p. 77)
This benign cliché becomes a manifesto. What starts as sameness turns prescriptive; Claire uses the phrase to erase difference, argue for merger, and justify possession. The line foreshadows identity theft as intimacy taken to its lethal extreme.

"I wrote some letters to the head of the medical school from women who wanted to complain about his conduct. Your ex. I wrote them all on different paper, using different handwriting. It was really very clever." (p. 174)
Her pride in craft—different paper, different handwriting—reveals both her cunning and her moral vacuum. The casual “really very clever” reframes cruelty as competence, proof that manipulation is her preferred art form.

"He read them and now the situation needs to be dealt with." (p. 235)
Clinical, passive, ominous: “the situation” effaces people and replaces feeling with logistics. Claire’s language transforms discovery into a problem to neutralize, making care indistinguishable from control.

"I love you," she says before turning back to the road with both hands on the steering wheel. (p. 243)
The declaration is tender in wording and terrifying in context. Positioned seconds before the crash, it suggests that her love culminates in obliteration—a devotion that would rather destroy than release.

"Thirty-five years old and youre still making up stories about your imaginary friend? Seriously?" (p. 183)
Mockery weaponizes the narrator’s past against her present. By gaslighting childhood truth as childish fantasy, Claire protects her constructed identity and further destabilizes the one person who knows her best.