Sam Connor
Quick Facts
- Role: Second child and only son of Blythe and Fox; younger brother to Violet
- First appearance: Born midway through the novel; his arrival reorients Blythe’s sense of motherhood
- Status: Dies at about one year old; his death is the novel’s central catastrophe
- Key relationships: Blythe (primary bond), Violet (idolized older sister), Fox (loving but distracted father)
Who They Are The essence of Sam Connor is hope made flesh. As the easy, affectionate second child, he gives Blythe the instinctive, nourishing connection she longed for and felt denied with Violet. His cheerful presence briefly sutures the family’s fractures, making their home feel possible again. That light is painfully short-lived: Sam’s death—and the chilling uncertainty about Violet’s involvement—confirms Blythe’s worst intuitions and detonates the family from the inside.
Personality & Traits Sam’s temperament stands in deliberate counterpoint to Violet’s. Where Violet reads as withholding and volatile, Sam radiates openness—his body, voice, and gaze all reaching toward connection. He becomes the proof Blythe clings to: that her love is not broken, and that mothering can feel natural and good.
- Happy, easygoing presence: His laughter is “spirited and expansive,” and strangers remark on his sunny disposition. In scenes at the park and on errands, his joy recalibrates the household’s mood, making ordinary days feel weightless.
- Deep mother–child attachment: From birth, he seeks Blythe’s body and voice, instantly soothed by her. Their bond validates Blythe’s maternal instincts and redefines her self-perception: with Sam, the role fits.
- Idolizes Violet: He lights up when Violet enters a room, kicks with excitement, and calls for her—“Bye-ette!”—from his crib. His innocent devotion sharpens the unease around Violet’s ambiguous behavior toward him.
- Tenderly evoked physicality: Blythe lingers on sensory details—the “wave of dark hair that ends in a curl,” “gap-toothed grin,” “huge blue eyes,” the “smell of his warm neck,” and the “fuzz of his head.” Her tactile descriptions read as love letters to his very being.
Character Journey Sam’s arc is brief yet transformative. He arrives as a “miracle,” and his existence immediately repairs something in Blythe that felt irreparably damaged after Violet’s infancy. Day by day, his easy temperament opens a space in the home where delight and routine can coexist: babbling, crawling, giggling, watching Violet with pure adoration. The fragile domestic truce falters under small, disquieting signs—Violet’s watchfulness, her disturbingly candid wishes, and ominous moments of near-danger. When Sam dies during a street crossing, Blythe’s conviction that Violet pushed the stroller crystallizes the novel’s examination of Nature vs. Nurture and Generational Trauma: Sam had seemed to disprove the idea that Blythe herself was the problem, yet his death suggests the family’s inherited darkness is not so easily undone.
Key Relationships
- Blythe Connor: Sam is the uncomplicated love that restores Blythe to herself. With him, she experiences the tenderness and instinct she had only read about, and that experience becomes her anchor. His death not only devastates her; it also validates the suspicions that isolate her from everyone else.
- Violet Connor: Sam adores Violet without reservation, a one-way devotion that reads as heartbreakingly vulnerable. Violet oscillates between performative care and chilling detachment—hushing him sweetly in the car, then saying, “I don’t want Sammy anymore,” or watching him sleep in the dark—culminating in the moment Blythe believes she sees Violet push the stroller.
- Fox Connor: Fox loves his son, but his focus tilts toward managing Violet and dismissing Blythe’s alarms. His refusal to see Violet as a threat leaves Sam exposed and widens the gulf between the parents, accelerating the family’s Marital Breakdown and Betrayal.
Defining Moments Even in a short life, Sam’s scenes carry structural weight—each one clarifying Blythe’s motherhood and the family’s fault lines.
- Sam’s birth: Blythe pulls him to her chest, whispering, “You’re here.” The instantaneous, embodied connection is euphoric, a counter-narrative to her earlier, alienating experience and a moment that reframes The Dark Side of Motherhood as something that can, briefly, be healed. This is her proof of maternal instinct and redemption. (The Dark Side of Motherhood is first linked below.)
- The zoo trip: The day before the accident, Violet tosses a “mom lion” out of the car and says, “I hate my mom.” The petty act curdles into heavy foreshadowing—maternal figures discarded, a child’s stated hatred, and the unsettling sense that play is masking intent.
- The street crossing and Sam’s death: Violet yanks Blythe’s arm; hot tea spills; the stroller rolls; Blythe is certain she sees a pink-mittened hand push. The horror fuses Blythe’s sensory certainty with everyone else’s disbelief, foregrounding Perception, Reality, and Gaslighting. Whether or not anyone believes her, the moral center of the story shifts: Blythe’s intuition, once pathologized, becomes the lens through which the family’s truth is finally seen.
- Birth as counterpoint to fear: In the delivery room, euphoria and oxytocin flood Blythe’s body—a vivid tonal contrast to the dread that will later define motherhood for her. This pivot marks the novel’s most hopeful register before the descent into grief and suspicion, exposing the fragility of domestic joy. The Dark Side of Motherhood
Essential Quotes
He was my miracle. I pulled him to my nipple and tapped its nub on his bottom lip with arms that still shook from the oxytocin. There you go, sweet boy. He was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen.
This image of self-led latching captures the primal, wordless bond Blythe yearned for. The tactile detail—shaking arms, the tap of the nipple—renders connection as a bodily truth, not a story Blythe tells herself.
He was everything I had ever wanted. The connection we shared was the only thing I could feel. I craved the physical weight of him on top of me. So this is it, I would think. This is what it’s supposed to be like. I drank him in like water.
The language of thirst and satiation reframes motherhood as nourishment going both ways: Sam feeds on Blythe, and Blythe is sustained by Sam. The repetition of “supposed to be” underscores how he rescues her from self-doubt.
His laughter was like a scream, spirited and expansive, and I lived for it. An older woman nearby with a little boy’s mittened hand in hers said to me, “What a cute baby you have, such a happy little guy!” Thank you, he’s mine, I made him.
Calling his laughter “like a scream” blends joy with intensity—a note of excess that hints at how precious and precarious this happiness is. Blythe’s proud “I made him” is both defiance and relief: a claim to competence she could never make with Violet.
As those words were coming out of my mouth, as I was clutching my burning skin with both hands, Sam’s stroller rolled onto the road. I will never forget her eyes in that moment—I couldn’t look away from them. But I knew what happened as soon as I heard it.
The sensory overload—heat, pain, the fixed gaze—captures how trauma brands itself on memory. The shift from sight (“her eyes”) to sound (“as soon as I heard it”) reflects the instant when knowledge outpaces proof.
“I think she pushed him,” I said to you quietly as you dabbed ointment on my burned skin. I couldn’t feel a thing. “I think she pushed him into the road. I told the police.”
Blythe’s flat repetitions (“I think… I think…”) read like a mind insisting on coherence while the body goes numb. The intimacy of tending a burn alongside the accusation underscores the novel’s fracture: domestic care and unbearable suspicion occupying the same moment.