CHARACTER
Stay Awakeby Megan Goldin

Liv Reese

Liv Reese

Quick Facts

  • Role: Protagonist and primary narrator; the novel’s most unreliable witness to her own life
  • First appearance: Chapter 1, waking in the back of a cab with no memory of how she got there
  • Condition: A rare anterograde amnesia that resets her memory every time she sleeps, erasing the last two years
  • Core conflict: Hunted by police and a real killer while trying to decode her own past and survive the present
  • Key relationships: Amy Decker (best friend), Marco Reggio (boyfriend), Brett Graham (antagonist), Ted Cole (fiancé during the missing years), Detective Darcy Halliday (investigator-turned-ally)
  • For more on the ensemble, see the Character Overview.

Who She Is

Liv Reese is a woman living in two irreconcilable timelines—who she believes she is and who the world insists she has become. Every time she wakes, she’s hurled back to a summer day two years earlier, just before a betrayal and a pair of murders shattered her life. The result is a protagonist who must outthink a killer with nothing but stray clues, ink scrawled on her skin, and instincts she’s not sure she can trust.

Liv’s body doubles as a case file she carries everywhere: a too-long, too-dark haircut that startles her in mirrors, a “short chic cut” she later reclaims to feel like herself again, arms covered in frantic ballpoint notes like “tattoo sleeves,” and a puckered scar below her ribcage—proof of a past her mind refuses to hold. Through her, the novel turns the fear of misremembering into a full-body experience, making the theme of The Unreliability of Perception feel immediate and threatening.

Personality & Traits

Liv’s personality is a conversation between who she was and who trauma has made her. She’s persistent, sharp, and deeply empathetic, yet haunted by panic and distrust. The tension between those halves powers the plot: every reset threatens to return her to helplessness, and every clue she deciphers is an act of self-creation.

  • Resilient, even defiant: Her mantra to “stay awake” is less an instruction than a battle cry. She refuses passivity, using self-authored clues (inked reminders, cached items) and improvisation to keep moving when the plot resets her mind.
  • Vulnerable and hunted: Liv’s amnesia makes her a perfect target for Vulnerability and Manipulation. She second-guesses everyone—and herself—because both the police and the real killer are steps ahead of her memory.
  • Intelligent and resourceful: A former senior staff writer, she thinks like an investigator. She connects the dotted fleur-de-lis on a pair of oxblood shoes to a buried memory and leverages a sliver of recall into a plan that ultimately saves her life.
  • Anxious and disoriented: Waking in a cab, noticing summer has snapped to winter, seeing herself on the news—each moment destabilizes her. The novel keeps her at a sustained pitch of dread, which she must act through rather than succumb to.
  • Loyal at her core: Before the amnesia, she loved Amy and Marco with a seriousness that makes their betrayal apocalyptic. That loyalty becomes motive both to retreat from and to confront the truth.
  • Body-as-notebook: The ink on her hands and the scar at her ribs function as externalized memory—raw, inelegant, and honest—turning her skin into the only archive she can trust.

Character Journey

Liv’s arc is cyclical until it suddenly isn’t. She begins as a victim of circumstance, waking into terror, eviction, and incriminating clues she can’t contextualize. She then learns to treat each waking as a restart: gather data, trust the ink, test assumptions, run. The hinge comes when a flash of memory surfaces—the dotted fleur-de-lis on a killer’s shoes—and she recognizes Brett Graham. From that point, she stops merely evading danger and starts directing the narrative: staging her survival, signaling Detective Halliday, and turning the warehouse trap into evidence and rescue. In breaking the forget-sleep-forget loop, Liv gains the ability to make new memories, transforming her story from a maze with no exit into a path forward—an arc that speaks directly to Memory and Identity.

Key Relationships

  • Amy Decker: Liv’s best friend and roommate, practically a sister. The discovery of Amy’s affair with Marco detonates Liv’s past, making every later act of distrust feel earned; loving Amy is the wound, mourning her is the engine.
  • Marco Reggio: The boyfriend Liv adored. His murder and betrayal set the two-year blank in motion, intertwining grief with guilt and forcing Liv to decide whether the truth will heal her or break her again.
  • Brett Graham: The surgeon boyfriend of Amy who is, in fact, the calculating killer. He leverages Liv’s resets to gaslight, frame, and stalk her, weaponizing what she can’t remember against what she knows in her bones.
  • Ted Cole: The fiancé from a life Liv can’t recall—proof that she built something tender after trauma. His genuine care and fatal pursuit of answers turn him into both a symbol of a lost future and another name in Brett’s ledger.
  • Detective Darcy Halliday: Initially a threat—badges mean arrest, and arrest means helplessness. But Darcy’s steadiness and intuition cut through the narrative fog; by the finale, she recognizes Liv’s truth and becomes the decisive force in her rescue.

Defining Moments

Liv’s story clicks into place through jolts—scenes that reset not only her understanding but ours. Each moment shifts her from prey to participant.

  • Waking in the cab (Chapter 1): The novel’s thesis in a single scene—Liv as a stranger to her own life. Why it matters: It establishes the rules of her condition and the claustrophobia of living moment-to-moment.
  • The bloody knife in her pocket (Chapter 2): Proof she’s tethered to violence she can’t remember. Why it matters: It recasts Liv as potential perpetrator and primes the police (and reader) to doubt her.
  • Realizing two years are missing (Chapter 9): A Google search confirms the scope of the void. Why it matters: Raises the stakes from “bad night” to existential crisis; the investigation becomes biographical.
  • Seeing herself on the news (Chapter 46): CCTV frames her as Ted Cole’s killer. Why it matters: Public suspicion becomes institutional pressure, forcing Liv to outpace a narrative that would annihilate her.
  • Flashback of Brett’s shoes (Chapter 59): Oxblood leather, dotted fleur-de-lis—an image finally anchors memory. Why it matters: The first concrete link to the original attack, transforming fear into strategy.
  • The warehouse showdown (Chs. 60–64): Trapped, she improvises, signals Halliday, and survives. Why it matters: Liv authors the ending; she’s no longer a character to whom things happen but the agent who makes them happen.

Essential Quotes

“Starbursts blink from streetlights like they’re sharing a secret as I wake to find myself slumped in the back of a cab, without any recollection of how I got here, or where I’m going.” — Chapter 1
This opening line marries lyricism to disorientation. The “secret” the lights keep mirrors the plot’s central mystery: the world knows something about Liv that she doesn’t, and we’re trapped in her vantage point.

“My breath hovers in the frigid air like a restless ghost. Summer, I realize with a shiver, has disappeared like a wrinkle in time.” — Chapter 1
Time behaves like weather—changing without warning—capturing the uncanny shift from summer to cold. The “restless ghost” is both her breath and her lost self, haunting the present without a body to inhabit.

“DON’T SLEEP! I FORGET EVERYTHING WHEN I FALL ASLEEP.” — written on her hand, Chapter 6
The note is survival tool and thesis statement. It externalizes cognition—Liv must outsource memory to ink—turning her body into a message board that future-Liv might or might not believe.

“Two years have passed, and I remember none of it. It feels as if I’ve been catapulted into the future.” — Chapter 9
This realization reframes the plot from a mystery-night to a life-sized absence. Being “catapulted” suggests violence: time itself has assaulted her, and the investigation becomes a way to land safely.

“I know I’m not a murderer. It’s not in me to kill someone.” — Chapter 34
A declaration of moral identity in a story designed to make her doubt. The line asks whether self-knowledge can survive without autobiographical memory—and insists that character is something deeper than recall.