Opening
Eve Bennett offers Addie Severson compassion after cheating—mercy urged by Nate Bennett—and that leniency becomes the doorway to Nate’s grooming. As Addie narrates their mounting secrecy and first sexual encounter, the section cements Abuse of Power and Predatory Behavior, while the whiplash between Nate’s personas with Addie and Eve sharpens Appearance vs. Reality and his calculated Deception and Manipulation.
What Happens
Chapter 36: A Second Chance
From Eve’s perspective, the day begins with resolve and ends with compromise. She calls Addie to her desk after class, prepared to confront her for cheating on the midterm. The girl approaches like she’s headed to the gallows. Eve’s anger softens as she remembers Nate urging grace the night before—insisting Addie is desperate, not malicious—so she chooses not to report Addie to the principal.
Eve lays out consequences and a path forward:
- Addie receives a zero on the midterm—for now.
- She must work with a peer tutor.
- If she shows significant improvement by the final, Eve will drop the zero.
Addie trembles with relief, thanks Eve repeatedly, and promises to change. Eve stays stern, warning that any future infraction will end the discussion. Privately, she admits this is only happening because Nate “sees something in her.”
Chapter 37: The Darkroom
The point of view shifts to Addie, who feels untouchable—she broke into Kenzie’s house and escaped consequences; she cheated and avoided expulsion. At poetry club, Nate praises her new poem, a hit of validation she’s starving for. After everyone leaves, he shuts the door and admits he interceded with Eve, telling her about Addie’s hard year. Calling her his “favorite student,” he collapses the boundary between teacher and teen.
Addie impulsively hugs him. The hug lingers; she feels his arousal. Nate breaks away, mortified, apologizing and blaming an unhappy marriage. He confesses a singular “connection” with her. Addie leaves, then turns back. Nate, still flushed, tells her to close the door—he’s “trying to resist,” he says, but he’s “helpless.” He kisses her—her first kiss—and leads her to an abandoned photography darkroom only he seems to use. In that private space, their physical relationship begins.
Chapter 38: Soulmate
Nate drives Addie home, dropping her a block away to avoid suspicion. He holds her hand as he reframes their behavior as a grand, tragic romance—she is his “soulmate,” thwarted only by age and marriage. He isolates her further by contrasting Addie’s love for poetry with Eve’s supposed indifference, crediting Addie with reigniting his creative life.
Secrecy becomes sacred. Nate tells her his entire career rests in her hands and forbids her from telling anyone—not her mother, not friends. Addie, thrilled to be a muse entrusted with a dangerous love, accepts the burden. The thrill of concealment fuses with her longing for meaning.
Chapter 39: A Different Man
Back with Eve, she grades papers before slipping out to meet her lover, Jay. Nate arrives home electric with desire—grabbing her, pushing for sex on the living room sofa, startling her with an intensity she hasn’t seen in years. Preoccupied and wary, Eve asks to wait.
Nate snaps, accusing her of hypocrisy for lamenting their sexless marriage and then rejecting him. He storms upstairs, spitting that he’ll “take care of it myself.” Eve sits in stunned confusion. The “gentle poet” she knows has vanished, replaced by someone volatile—a jarring split that the reader understands in light of the darkroom encounter.
Chapter 40: Sweet Adeline
Addie orbits entirely around her secret. At poetry club, Lotus calls her new love poem “sappy”—a wound that stings because it’s true. Addie declines Lotus’s pizza invite to protect her secret and heads to the darkroom, replaying her last moments with Nate. They coordinate through Snapflash, an app with disappearing messages that keeps their trail clean.
Nate arrives, calls her “My sweet Adeline,” and reads a poem he wrote for her, full of romantic clichés about youth reviving a stagnant life. Addie is enthralled, certain her own work is childish beside his. The poem completes the seduction: he undresses her; she hesitates but does not stop him. In the darkroom, she loses her virginity, silently reciting his lines as if they sanctify the act.
Character Development
The section maps a rapid, chilling transformation: a desperate student accepts a lifeline, then surrenders to a teacher’s staged intimacy; a husband weaponizes poetry and privacy; a wife extends grace while misreading the danger in her own home.
- Addie Severson: Moves from shame and fear to full immersion in a secret affair, adopting Nate’s “soulmate” narrative as truth. She isolates herself—rebuffing Lotus, hiding from her mother—and conflates validation with love, reciting Nate’s poem during sex as if it confers meaning.
- Nate Bennett: Fully unveils his predatory strategy—special treatment, private praise, confessions of marital misery, pet names, and a controlled hideaway. He alternates between contrition and entitlement, shifting blame (“helpless”) while demanding secrecy and pushing boundaries with Eve.
- Eve Bennett: Extends compassionate leniency but remains blind to Nate’s duplicity. Her bafflement at his sudden aggression highlights how thoroughly he partitions his personas; her trust—and her own divided life with Jay—complicates the moral terrain without diminishing her vulnerability.
Themes & Symbols
Power and exploitation define the arc. The teacher-student imbalance allows a slow rebranding of misconduct into “romance,” turning authority into access. Language—favorite, soulmate, muse—functions as a grooming toolkit that reframes transgression as fate. Deception works on multiple fronts: Nate lies to Eve about motives and to Addie about meaning; secrecy itself becomes proof of love. The public image of a devoted teacher and gentle husband collapses under his volatile outbursts at home, sharpening the split between seeming and being.
The darkroom embodies concealment. It is hidden, soundproof, and obsolete—perfect for a relationship that must not develop in the light. Snapflash’s disappearing messages extend that darkness into the digital space, erasing the record and training Addie to see invisibility as safety. Poetry, meanwhile, is weaponized as enchantment: metaphor and meter turn pressure into devotion, transforming predation into a script of destiny.
Key Quotes
“You’re my favorite student.”
Nate crowns Addie with special status to breach professional boundaries. The flattery isolates her from peers and teachers while initiating a private loyalty that he can exploit.
“I’m trying to resist you, but I’m helpless.”
By framing desire as uncontrollable, Nate shifts responsibility onto a vague inevitability and, by extension, onto Addie. The line both excuses his actions and cues her to see compliance as compassion.
“You’re my soulmate.”
This romantic hyperbole recasts an illicit power dynamic as star-crossed fate. It flatters Addie into secrecy and primes her to accept risk as noble sacrifice.
“My sweet Adeline.”
The pet name signals possession and intimacy on his terms, collapsing the teacher-student boundary into a private world where he sets the rules. It also mirrors the chapter title, underscoring how language orchestrates the affair.
“My entire career is in your hands.”
Nate inverts power by burdening a teenager with adult consequences, making silence a moral obligation. The manipulation fuses love with protectiveness, binding Addie to him through fear.
“I’ll take care of it myself.”
At home, Nate’s crude anger exposes the fracture between persona and reality. The line hints at guilt, entitlement, and a need to reassert control—emotions that propel his volatility with Eve.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
This sequence is the pivot of the novel: the grooming culminates in a sexual relationship, reshaping the story from academic strain and marital drift into a psychological thriller anchored in predation. The dramatic irony—Addie rapt with “soulmate” language while Eve reels from an inexplicable mood swing—tightens suspense and stakes. Patterns that will matter later are established now: the darkroom as cover, Snapflash as erasure, poetry as spell, secrecy as currency. Nate stands revealed as the primary antagonist, Addie as his victim, and Eve as the unwitting witness whose compassion unknowingly abets him—setting up exposure, fallout, and the costly reckoning to come.