CHARACTER
The Reappearance of Rachel Priceby Holly Jackson

Annabel 'Bel' Price

Annabel “Bel” Price

Quick Facts

Who They Are

Bold, cutting, and achingly lonely, Annabel “Bel” Price is a teenager defined by a mystery she can’t remember and a world that won’t let her forget. She has built a fierce loyalty to the one person she’s certain never left—her father—only to be thrust into a new reality when her missing mother resurfaces and the family story begins to split at the seams. Bel’s chess-queen trophies and pocketed trinkets reveal a need to hold onto what can’t walk away; her clipped answers and prickling humor keep everyone else at arm’s length.

Bel is repeatedly compared to her mother in looks—warm fair skin, a sharp chin that “sharpened more” when she spoke or smiled, short honey-blond hair, round gray-blue eyes. She resents the comparison, aligning herself with her father instead. That tension—face like a ghost, heart pledged to the parent who stayed—becomes the emotional fault line the novel breaks open.

Personality & Traits

Bel’s armor is sarcasm; her instinct is control; her fear is abandonment. The book invites us to watch her use those defenses—and then outgrow them—as she learns to read not just clues but people, including herself.

  • Guarded and cynical: In her first on-camera interview, she defaults to “I don’t know,” using evasion to keep the documentary crew—and their narrative—out. Her suspicion of outsiders frames the entire investigation.
  • Fiercely loyal: She initially orients her life around protecting her father, pushing back against community suspicion and her grandmother’s doubts. That loyalty is so central that when it collapses, she has to rebuild her self-concept from scratch.
  • Perceptive and analytical: Bel catches the tiny snags that unravel the case—an engine that couldn’t have been running, a “fifteen” that should have been “sixteen,” mysteriously precise recall about a long-lost bracelet. What begins as prickly skepticism becomes methodical inquiry.
  • Traumatized and abandonment-wary: She avoids sitting in backseats, the physical space of her formative loss. Emotionally, she preemptively pushes away friends and family so they can’t leave first.
  • Compulsive collector (kleptomania): She steals small, “permanent” objects—a chess queen, a scrunchie, a pen—to manufacture security. The hidden stash is a private museum of things that won’t betray her.

Character Journey

Bel starts as a reactive teen orbiting her father’s gravity: the “good daughter” of a tragedy, expert at not knowing. When her mother returns, shock curdles into doubt; doubt hardens into purpose. Bel turns the skills she once used to protect herself—silence, misdirection, scrutiny—into tools for pursuit. She probes inconsistencies in her mother’s story, runs her own off-camera interviews, and plays roles (even posing as her mother on the phone) to force the truth to surface. The investigation leads her to a library of distress signals hidden in books and, finally, to a logging yard where her childhood story ends and her adult one begins. Choosing her mother over her father doesn’t just resolve a case; it rewrites Bel’s identity. She steps out of the role of victim-daughter and into self-authorship, building a chosen family with the people who survived—and who choose one another back.

Key Relationships

  • Charlie Price: Charlie is Bel’s bedrock—until he isn’t. Her fierce defense of him makes his betrayal the deepest rupture of her life, forcing her to interrogate not just his actions but the ways her identity was constructed around his innocence.

  • Rachel Price: Once a ghost and then a suspect, Rachel becomes a living person Bel has to learn, not project onto. As Bel uncovers the depth of Rachel’s endurance and the truth behind her disappearance, suspicion gives way to protective love and, ultimately, allegiance.

  • Carter Price: Carter is Bel’s closest confidante even before the truth of their sisterhood emerges. The revelation reframes their intimacy as something innate rather than elective, anchoring Bel’s new family structure in loyalty that predates memory.

  • Ash Maddox: What starts as a foil for Bel’s sarcasm becomes a trustworthy partner. Ash believes Bel’s instincts early, giving her the validation she needs to investigate—and modeling a version of trust not predicated on blood or history.

  • Patrick “Pat” Price: The genial-grandfather veneer hides the novel’s ugliest truth. Confronting him forces Bel to accept that danger can wear a family face—and that complicity can be inherited unless actively refused.

Defining Moments

Bel’s arc crystallizes in a handful of scenes where defense mechanisms crack and a detective is born.

  • The first interview: By answering with “I don’t know,” Bel controls the documentary’s narrative and shields herself from exploitation. It shows how silence can be power—but also hints at the limits of hiding.
  • Rachel’s reappearance on the street: Bel’s instinct to run reveals how destabilizing hope can be for someone trained by loss. The flight response marks the start of her emotional thaw: fear first, then engagement.
  • Catching the inconsistencies: She notices the engine detail and the “fifteen vs. sixteen” slip, translating gut discomfort into evidence. This is where Bel’s skepticism matures into method.
  • The phone call with Mr. Tripp: Posing as her mother to learn about the $3,000 cash reframes the disappearance as a choice—until later facts complicate that reading. It proves Bel can extract truth by stepping into a role rather than waiting for answers.
  • Finding the messages in the books: The coded pleas—“Help. My name is Rachel Price. I am being kept by Patrick Price…”—collapse the uncertainty. Bel trades suspicion for certainty, and loyalty for justice.
  • The final confrontation at the logging yard: Closing her mother’s hand around the key to her father’s cuff is both verdict and vow. It completes her transformation from protector of a lie to author of a new family truth.

Essential Quotes

“This is Annabel. The daughter of Rachel Price. That last part said in a knowing whisper. Because even though Rachel was gone, everything existed only in relation to her.”

This line captures Bel’s suffocating public identity: she’s always “the daughter of,” never simply herself. The return of the person who defines her actually enables the separation—Bel can finally become someone in her own right by confronting, not avoiding, that relational label.

“It was easy to push people away when you knew how. Bel had a clean record; she was very, very good at it. Making people leave her before they chose to go anyway. Same result in the end, because everybody left eventually, but it hurt less. That was what life was, choosing the way that hurt less.”

Bel articulates abandonment as inevitability and intimacy as risk management. The novel’s drama tests this credo, asking whether preventing pain is worth the cost of connection—and showing Bel choose connection anyway.

“The knot came undone in her gut, the pressure easing, a new lightness in her head as she felt the cool marble against her skin. A strong feeling, but it never lasted. At least the thing itself was permanent.”

Her thefts are emotional first aid: sensation and certainty in place of trust. The objects’ permanence exposes the paradox—things can’t leave, but they also can’t love—nudging Bel toward people who can.

“She closed Rachel’s hand around the key, into a fist. Skin to skin, bone to bone. Held it there, tight. Eyes on her mom’s. She chose her.”

This image fuses legal action with intimate touch: justice as a physical handover. Bel’s choice is not just against her father; it’s for her mother and for a future she’s willing to claim.

“They had to decide these things, together, as a family. Make their choices, to undo all the ones made for them.”

The closing ethic reframes family as an act, not a given. After a life scripted by other people’s decisions, Bel insists on mutual agency—the antidote to both deception and abandonment.