Opening
Confessions rupture the Sorenson family’s careful equilibrium as the narrative braids present crises with searing flashbacks. A runaway shows up, a baby is born, old lovers reappear, and a long-buried truth snaps into focus—redefining loyalties, betrayals, and what it means to belong.
What Happens
Chapter 26: Confessions and Departures
Jonah Bendt turns up at Grace Sorenson’s Portland apartment. Playing “cool aunt,” Grace takes him to The Comeback, where the crowd and whiskey loosen her fear. She breaks: she never got into law school and has been lying. Jonah steadies her, insisting her parents adore her and calling her childhood bedroom a “shrine.” He confesses his own secret—during David Sorenson’s accident, he wasn’t holding the ladder; the dog startled him. Grace tells him he isn’t to blame, and Jonah, sensing her need to feel wanted, nudges her toward a handsome Irish bartender named Luke.
Grace goes home with Luke. Jonah returns to her apartment and runs into Ben, the ex who just broke Grace’s heart. In a clumsy stab at protectiveness, Jonah implies Grace is spending the night elsewhere, gutting Ben. Alone, Jonah finds a birthday card from David with $100—he’s sixteen—and the reality of Violet Sorenson-Lowell’s rejection crushes him. He bolts again. A brief flashback shows David waking in the hospital, squeezing Marilyn Sorenson’s hand three times. Grace returns—raw from losing her virginity—to a quiet apartment and a cryptic note. Panicking, she calls Wendy Sorenson and spills everything: Jonah’s visit, the law school lie, the hookup. Wendy, unusually tender, soothes her with the story of her first time.
The chapter drops back to 2005. Wendy’s daughter, Ivy, is stillborn. The physical and psychic devastation is relentless, worsened by Violet’s absence; studying for the bar, she shows up hours late. When she finally arrives, Wendy turns to ice, clocking her sister’s new engagement ring and shutting her out—a fracture that will calcify. David quietly grills Wendy’s doctor for answers. At home, a young Grace learns what happened from her father; the smell of burning bread forever becomes the scent of bad news.
Chapter 27: A Rescue and a Secret
In the present, Jonah calls Wendy from a Montana jail after a broken taillight stop. She books a flight, equal parts relieved and exasperated. Back in Oak Park, David’s recovery at home leaves him feeling infantilized by Marilyn’s vigilance. They argue, then fall into a fragile détente—until the phone rings: Liza Sorenson is in labor.
A 2006 flashback lands at Violet’s wedding. Still gutted from Ivy’s death, Wendy drinks hard. David pulls her into his office to sober up, but her grief turns venomous: she accuses Violet of pretending everything is perfect and spits out a warning about “Violet and her huge fucking secret.” David is rattled. He later waves it off to Marilyn as drunken nonsense, but the suspicion lodges like a splinter.
Chapter 28: A Birth and a Ghost
Marilyn rushes Liza to the hospital; David refuses to go, citing germs. She’s furious, convinced something deeper is festering. At triage, Marilyn freezes: Liza’s OB is Dr. Gillian Levin, David’s former colleague and affair partner. Liza picked her on purpose. Marilyn calls David; he admits he knew and “forgot” to tell her amid the chaos, then confesses the truth—he doesn’t feel strong enough, physically or emotionally, to be helpful. Hearing his fear, Marilyn softens. She and Gillian share a surprisingly warm catch-up.
Flashbacks from 2010–2011 fill in the missing years. Wendy tends to Miles Eisenberg through his first cancer diagnosis, a season of devotion edged with dread. Violet spirals into postpartum depression after Wyatt’s birth—her medicated, detached fog a stark contrast to the raw, consuming grief that followed relinquishing Jonah. At home, a fifteen-year-old Grace enjoys a quiet night with her parents, a gentle snapshot from the family’s last years together. Then, briefly, light: Miles in remission, Wendy allowed hope.
Chapter 29: The Road Home
Wendy collects Jonah from Montana, and the drive back becomes a confessional booth. Jonah owns his fear and guilt and admits he may have blown up Liza and Ryan by telling Ryan about Liza’s affair. Wendy answers with her deepest loss—Ivy—and a secret that rewires Jonah’s story: she was the first person to hold him after he was born. Something settles. Jonah sees that Wendy will not drop him; he belongs.
Flashbacks to 2011 show Marilyn and David dropping Grace at college and returning to a house finally, truly empty. The quiet is sad but intimate. Another memory returns to Violet’s postpartum darkness, measuring the numbness of medication against the blazing pain of giving up Jonah; the secret she keeps from her husband yawns wider.
Chapter 30: A Return and a Revelation
Back in Oak Park, Jonah submits to Marilyn’s grounding: one month. At a tense family dinner, Wendy admits she hired a private investigator to find him. The table erupts when Marilyn shames David for not seeing Liza’s baby, Kit. He clings to germs; his face says something else. Later, David finds Jonah shooting baskets, thanks him for saving his life, and releases him from the ladder guilt.
That night, Wendy’s chance sighting of her high school boyfriend, Aaron Bhargava, slams into memory. Jonah’s blue eyes, his build, his “inverted elbows”—it’s Aaron. The story Violet told about a random college boy named Rob collapses. Sixteen years of history reorder around Violet’s lie. A final flashback to 2013 finds Wendy at Violet’s house just after Miles’s cancer returns, terminal. For once, the sisters hold each other without weapons.
Character Development
These chapters pry everyone open. Confessions force intimacy; old griefs set terms for new love and loyalty.
- Grace Sorenson
- Admits she lied about law school and confronts her loneliness and shame.
- Reaches for adult honesty, first with Jonah, then with Wendy.
- Loses her virginity, then faces its emotional aftermath without self-punishment.
- Jonah Bendt
- Runs, then returns, learning to ask for rescue and accept care.
- Confesses his role in Liza’s breakup and his ladder guilt; receives absolution.
- Claims a secure place in the family through his bond with Wendy.
- Wendy Sorenson
- Steps into fierce, maternal caretaking of Jonah.
- Revisits Ivy’s stillbirth and Miles’s illness, clarifying her guardedness.
- Becomes the story’s catalyst by identifying Jonah’s true father.
- David Sorenson
- Chafes under convalescence and reveals hidden fragility around birth and hospitals.
- Offers Jonah grace about the accident and faces his past with Gillian more honestly.
- Violet Sorenson-Lowell
- Appears largely through others’ memories: absent in Wendy’s crisis, undone by postpartum depression.
- Her foundational lie about Jonah’s paternity surfaces.
- Marilyn Sorenson
- Holds the center, torn between caregiving and anger.
- Extends compassion to David after he names his fear; steadies Liza through labor.
Themes & Symbols
Secrets and Their Consequences. The engine of these chapters is revelation. Grace’s lie collapses under the weight of isolation. David’s refusal to meet Kit stems from an unspoken trauma, not “germs.” Most transformative is Wendy’s discovery that Violet lied about Jonah’s father. The past stops muttering and starts speaking, and the family must listen. This intensifies the novel’s exploration of Secrets and Their Consequences: every concealment reappears as a choice someone else must pay for.
The Complexity of Family and Sisterhood. These pages test and prove the elastic bands of kinship. The stillbirth of Ivy detonates between sisters; the present-day rescue of Jonah and tender handling of Grace show a countervailing strength. Wendy and Violet ping-pong between rivalry and refuge, while Marilyn and David relearn partnership through illness and apology. The book’s insistence on contradiction—resentment and devotion, judgment and mercy—embodies The Complexity of Family and Sisterhood.
Grief and Trauma. Old pain directs present behavior: Wendy’s brittleness, Violet’s depressive fog, David’s retreat from the hospital, even Grace’s panic. Sensory talismans—burning bread (bad news), a broken taillight (exposure), a bedroom “shrine” (frozen love)—carry emotional charge. The narrative suggests healing arrives not from erasing trauma but from naming it together.
Key Quotes
“I lied about law school.”
Grace’s confession punctures the image she’s been defending. The lie’s collapse is not just humiliating; it opens a path back to intimacy with her family through truth-telling.
Her parents adore her; her childhood bedroom is a “shrine.”
Jonah’s observation reframes Grace’s worth in the family. Calling the room a “shrine” highlights how love can calcify into pressure—and how recognition from an outsider can rehumanize it.
“Violet and her huge fucking secret.”
Wendy’s drunken line at the 2006 wedding functions as a flare in the dark. It plants the mystery that Chapter 30 finally resolves and exposes how grief can sharpen intuition, even when misdirected by rage.
“Germs.”
David’s stated reason for avoiding the hospital is a single, flimsy word. Its thinness reveals a deeper wound—fear, shame, or both—and the gap between what he can say and what he feels.
The same “inverted elbows.”
Wendy’s epiphany rests on a bodily rhyme between Jonah and Aaron Bhargava. This specific, almost odd detail makes the revelation tactile and undeniable, collapsing Violet’s story in an instant.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
Grace’s reassurance to Jonah about the ladder accident models the chapter’s moral movement: away from self-punishment toward shared accountability and forgiveness.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
This run of chapters delivers the novel’s emotional and structural climax. Past and present finally lock together: Ivy’s stillbirth explains the sisters’ cold war; Miles’s illness contextualizes Wendy’s guard; Violet’s lie about Jonah’s father detonates years of misdirection. The birth of Kit, Jonah’s second flight and rescue, and David’s faltering recovery each force the Sorensons to test how much honesty they can survive. By the end, the family’s façade is gone. What remains—hard-won love, raw truth, and a reckoning deferred only briefly—sets the stage for the inevitable confrontation that will redefine every bond in the house.