Brooke Sullivan
Quick Facts
Brooke Sullivan is the 28-year-old nurse practitioner, protagonist, and first-person narrator of The Inmate. After her parents’ deaths, she returns to Raker, New York, and—out of financial necessity—accepts a position at the Raker Maximum Security Penitentiary, where her high school boyfriend, Shane Nelson, is incarcerated.
- Role: Protagonist; lens for the novel’s mystery and revelations
- Age/Occupation: 28; nurse practitioner and single mother
- First Appearance: Opening chapter, returning to Raker and entering the prison
- Setting Anchor: Raker, New York; Raker Maximum Security Penitentiary
- Key Relationships: Shane Nelson; Tim Reese; Pamela Nelson (Margie); Josh Sullivan
Who She Is
At heart, Brooke is a survivor who refuses to let the worst night of her life define her—even though it shadows nearly every choice she makes. Practical, self-effacing, and hypervigilant, she methodically minimizes risk (from her understated clothing to her guarded routines) while pursuing the one thing she trusts: her capacity to care for others. That instinct makes her a superb clinician and devoted mother, but it also leaves her susceptible to predators who weaponize kindness and “normalcy.”
Her narration pulls the reader inside a mind shaped by trauma and doubt. Brooke becomes the novel’s moral and psychological barometer—testing the stories she’s been told, and the ones she has told herself, until the truth finally surfaces.
Personality & Traits
On the surface, Brooke reads as careful and calm; underneath, she’s a tangle of vigilance, love, and old fear. The tension between her clinical competence and personal uncertainty powers the story’s suspense.
- Protective and maternal: Nearly every decision—moving back to Raker, vetting childcare, even when to confront suspects—tracks back to Josh’s safety, anchoring the theme of Maternal Instinct and Protection.
- Haunted and anxious: The prison gates, the farmhouse, even a piece of jewelry can trigger spirals of panic, embodying The Past Haunting the Present.
- Resilient and independent: Estranged from her parents and pregnant at eighteen, she still completes her training and builds a life for her son—proof of endurance rather than luck.
- Professionally compassionate: She advocates for inmates’ basic care (pressing her superior, Dorothy, to secure a proper mattress for a paraplegic), showing a principled ethics that doesn’t collapse under pressure.
- Trusting, even naive: Her craving for stability lets Tim and “Margie” into her home and heart—access they exploit—driving the novel’s exploration of Deception and Betrayal.
- Prone to self-doubt: Brooke second-guesses her memory of the farmhouse and her ability to read people, enacting The Unreliability of Memory and Perception.
- Hypervigilant practicality: She dresses to erase herself—dark ponytail, minimal makeup, non-suggestive professional clothes—signaling both savvy risk assessment and the lingering fear that her body might be used against her.
Character Journey
Brooke begins in retreat: she returns to Raker under duress, eyes on survival and her son’s routine, not on healing. Treating Shane for the first time ruptures the narrative she’s clung to for eleven years; his insistence on innocence lodges in her like a splinter she can’t ignore. As she pushes back against the prison’s neglect (and her own avoidance), small acts of professional courage spill into personal life: the snowflake necklace Tim gifts her recoils through memory, doubt hardens into suspicion, and suspicion into investigation. The discoveries come fast and brutal—Kelli Underwood’s body, the manipulation masquerading as love, the farmhouse’s true history—and Brooke stops running. In the climax, she confronts Pamela, reclaims the story of that night, and fights for Josh’s future. By the end, she is no longer the girl who barely survived; she is the woman who chooses, investigates, and acts.
Key Relationships
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Josh Sullivan: Brooke’s love for her son is unconditional and vigilant; it gives her purpose and focus even when everything else is uncertain. Her secrecy about his father complicates their closeness, but Josh also anchors Brooke’s courage—she risks exposure and retaliation because protecting him is nonnegotiable.
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Shane Nelson: First love, the father of her child, and the face of her nightmares. Seeing him as a patient forces Brooke to test the story that has governed her life; his claims of innocence destabilize her certainties and crack open a path from terror to compassion. Whether or not he is guilty, he represents the past Brooke can neither disown nor ignore.
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Tim Reese: The promise of safety and normalcy—childhood best friend turned steady boyfriend—Tim seems like the partner Brooke and Josh deserve. That image becomes a mask for exploitation: he studies her vulnerabilities, imitates the rituals of trust, and twists her need for family into complicity. His betrayal is devastating precisely because it feels like the death of a future Brooke was finally allowing herself to imagine.
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Pamela Nelson (Margie): As “Margie,” she is the grandmotherly helper Brooke didn’t know she needed—competent, warm, and available. The revelation that she is Pamela, manipulative and lethal, turns comfort into a trap and exposes how thoroughly Brooke’s longing for community was weaponized against her.
Defining Moments
Brooke’s turning points blend professional duty with personal reckoning, each event forcing her to reassess what she knows and whom she trusts.
- First day at Raker Penitentiary: Walking into the prison reopens the wound she has tried to scar over. Why it matters: It sets the novel’s central tension—Brooke must work inside the system that holds her past.
- Treating Shane again after eleven years: Clinical touch meets traumatic memory; his insistence on innocence punctures her certainty. Why it matters: Doubt becomes a catalyst, shifting Brooke from avoidance to inquiry.
- Tim’s snowflake necklace: A romantic gesture that mirrors the object used in an attempt on her life. Why it matters: The gift converts nostalgia into alarm, steering Brooke toward the truth about Tim.
- Discovering Kelli Underwood’s body: Horror overtakes denial in Tim’s basement. Why it matters: It confirms Brooke’s worst suspicions and collapses the “safe future” illusion.
- Confrontation at the farmhouse: Brooke returns to the origin point and faces Pamela. Why it matters: She seizes authorship of her story, protecting Josh and reclaiming her memory from those who distorted it.
Essential Quotes
As the prison doors slam shut behind me, I question every decision I’ve ever made in my life.
This line captures Brooke’s baseline: hyperaware, self-scrutinizing, and already at war with her past. The prison isn’t just a setting; it’s a physical metaphor for the narrative she’s locked inside—and must find a way to exit.
This is exactly the sort of place where a child should grow up. This is exactly what my little family needed.
Brooke’s yearning for stability reframes ordinary comforts as salvation. The repetition (“exactly”) reveals how badly she wants the promise to be true—and how fragile that promise is.
I touched him. After all these years, I touched Shane Nelson again. I wait for the wave of revulsion... But the revulsion doesn’t come. Touching Shane’s shoulder doesn’t feel any different than touching anyone else.
Clinical touch undercuts myth. The absence of revulsion cracks the monster narrative and rehumanizes Shane, making space for Brooke to question memory, evidence, and the stories she’s been told.
I’ve known him my whole life. He’s a good guy. He wouldn’t lie, and he sure as hell wouldn’t kill anyone. I know it better than I know my own name.
This is trust as incantation—Brooke tries to speak certainty into existence. The insistence (“better than I know my own name”) exposes the leap from familiarity to absolution, the very leap her enemies exploit.
I had to do whatever I can to make this right.
A pivot from survival to responsibility. The vague “this” contains past errors and present dangers; “make this right” signals Brooke’s shift from passive endurance to active moral agency.