Hannah Brooks

Quick Facts

• Role: Protagonist and first-person narrator; elite Executive Protection Agent (bodyguard)
• First appearance: Opening chapter, immediately after her mother’s funeral
• Key relationships: Jack Stapleton (client-turned-love), Robby (ex and colleague), Taylor (best friend), her mother (deceased), Connie Stapleton (maternal figure), boss Glenn Schultz

Who They Are

At once razor-competent and emotionally hidden, Hannah Brooks is a bodyguard whose greatest advantage is how ordinary she looks—and how completely she subsumes herself into the job. She’s reeling from her mother’s death and a brutal breakup with Robby when her boss, Glenn Schultz, sidelines her and assigns her to protect Jack Stapleton, a movie star returning to his Texas ranch to care for his sick mother. The catch—she must pretend to be Jack’s girlfriend—forces this boundary-obsessed professional into emotional terrain she’s long avoided, thrusting her into the heart of the book’s exploration of Love and Vulnerability.

Appearance & Presence

Hannah is deliberately crafted as the anti-stereotype bodyguard, a living inversion central to Appearance vs. Reality. Petite (five-five, “five-six” if you ask her), with plain brown hair usually in a low, messy bun and a rotation of practical Ann Taylor suits and flats, she blends into backgrounds so she can control them.

You’re thinking I’m five-foot-five, and female, and nothing even close to brawny... You’d think I was a kindergarten teacher before you’d ever suspect that I could kill you with a corkscrew.

Her discomfort when the assignment demands sundresses and visible “girlfriend” softness dramatizes her core conflict: being seen feels more dangerous than any physical threat.

Personality & Traits

Hannah’s competence is armor—honed by training, sharpened by vigilance, and worn to hide grief. Her professional control allows her to scan for danger without ever risking the one thing she can’t manage: intimacy.

• Professional and competent: She instantly establishes authority by flipping Jack during their first meeting, turning his celebrity expectations inside out and proving she’s not a decorative escort but a strategist who anticipates threats before they form.
• Guarded and emotionally reserved: She refuses to share personal details with clients and treats feelings as liabilities. The fake-girlfriend ruse terrifies her because it requires exposure, pressing against the very boundaries she believes keep her safe—exactly the pressure point of Love and Vulnerability.
• Workaholic: She describes herself as a shark who must keep moving, using nonstop assignments to outrun grief and loneliness. Stillness equals contact with pain; motion is her chosen anesthesia.
• Insecure: Robby’s parting shot—that she’s “no fun” and a “bad kisser”—maps onto her oldest fear: that she’s unlovable. Early on, she assumes Jack’s warmth must be performance, not truth, because she can’t imagine being genuinely wanted.
• Loyal and protective: Her instinct to shield isn’t just professional. On the rooftop, she defies orders to protect Jack and de-escalates with empathy rather than force—evidence that her deepest strength is human connection, not brute power.

Character Journey

Hannah begins at rock bottom: a mother buried, a boyfriend gone, a career benched. When she’s forced into the pretend-intimacy of Jack’s “girlfriend,” her carefully maintained distance erodes. Living with the Stapletons immerses her in a familial warmth she’s never known; the gentle steadiness of Connie Stapleton cracks her cynicism and ties her healing to Grief, Family, and Healing. Jack repeatedly invites her to be seen—and believed. When he recognizes the song she hums and she shares the story of her traumatic eighth birthday, she crosses the threshold from secrecy to trust. In the climax, she defies orders to save him and resolves the core tension of her life: real security doesn’t come from control or flight, but from rootedness in love. By the end, she chooses presence over escape, balancing a vocation she excels at with a home she no longer wants to run from.

Key Relationships

• Jack Stapleton: What begins as a high-stakes assignment and a fake relationship becomes the first space where Hannah feels safe enough to be fully herself. Jack’s steady affirmation counters her internalized criticism; he sees the professional guardian and the wounded woman beneath it, and he invites both to stay.

• Robby: His breakup the day after her mother’s funeral weaponizes her insecurities—“you don’t know what love is”—and becomes the voice in her head Hannah must outgrow. As a foil to Jack, Robby’s selfishness highlights how genuine love nurtures rather than diminishes.

• Taylor: Her best friend’s affair with Robby isolates Hannah at her lowest point. Confronting Taylor forces Hannah to voice her hurt, set boundaries, and practice forgiveness without self-erasure—proof of growing self-respect.

• Her Mother: Alcoholism and trauma make their bond chaotic and fraught, but discovering that her mother kept the beaded safety pin reframes the past. Hannah learns to hold both harm and love, transforming complicated grief into a steadier peace.

Defining Moments

Hannah’s arc is marked by tests that expose her defenses and then invite her to replace them with connection.

• The Breakup: Robby ends things the day after the funeral, declaring she doesn’t know what love is. Why it matters: This cruelty names her fear and primes her to mistake kindness for performance—an obstacle she must dismantle to accept real intimacy.
• Flipping Jack: She drops him in a fluid jujitsu move during their first meeting. Why it matters: The moment shatters celebrity power dynamics and establishes Hannah’s authority; her small frame is not a limitation but a strategic advantage.
• The Brazos River: After nearly drowning and losing the beaded safety pin her mother saved, she breaks down and lets Jack comfort her. Why it matters: Physical peril unlocks emotional vulnerability; accepting comfort is a turning point.
• Sharing Her Past: Jack recognizes the tune she hums, prompting her to reveal the trauma of her eighth birthday. Why it matters: It’s her first deliberate act of trust, shifting her from secrecy to reciprocity.
• The Rooftop Confrontation: Ignoring an order from Glenn, she returns to protect Jack and defuses the armed intruder with empathy. Why it matters: She proves that her greatest weapon is understanding, not force—and that love, not protocol, now guides her choices.

Symbols & Motifs

• Protection and Security: Hannah’s job embodies physical safety, but her journey reframes security as the courage to be known. The fake relationship becomes a test lab for emotional risk, revealing that walls keep danger out—and love, too.
• The “shark” metaphor: Constant motion symbolizes her avoidance of pain; learning to be still marks healing.
• The beaded safety pin: A relic of childhood and proof of her mother’s care, it becomes a talisman of resilience. When Jack finds and returns it, he returns to Hannah the part of herself she thought was lost: the child who deserved tenderness.

Essential Quotes

I can’t just sit here and—and … and marinate in all my misery. I need to be in motion. I need to go somewhere. I’m like a shark, you know? I just always have to be moving. I need to get water through my gills. If I stay here, I’ll die. This self-diagnosis reveals Hannah’s avoidance style: motion as anesthesia. The metaphor lays out her arc in miniature—learning that stillness, not speed, is where grief can be metabolized and love can take root.

You only say that,” Robby said then, his voice tinged with a certainty I’ll never forget, “because you don’t know what love is. Weaponized certainty becomes a script Hannah carries into new intimacy. The story then dismantles it, contrasting punitive “judgment” with love-as-care, showing how external verdicts warp self-worth until countered by gentler truths.

I think just because you can’t keep something doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth it. Nothing lasts forever. What matters is what we take with us. I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to escape. I’ve spent too much time on the run from hard things. But now I wonder if escape is overrated. Here, acceptance replaces escapism. The insight reframes loss—from failure to teacher—and marks Hannah’s shift from running to choosing presence, even when it hurts.

Maybe love isn’t a judgment you render—but a chance you take. Maybe it’s something you choose to do—over and over. For yourself. And everyone else. Because love isn’t like fame. It’s not something other people bestow on you. It’s not something that comes from outside. Love is something you do. Love is something you generate. This becomes Hannah’s thesis. She rejects love as external validation (Robby’s model) and embraces it as a daily practice—an interior power she can generate and offer, the foundation of a life no longer organized around escape.