Ed Fox

Quick Facts

• Role: Estranged husband of the protagonist, first introduced as a steady voice on the phone
• First appearance: Anna’s daily calls early in the novel
• Status: Deceased prior to the novel’s present action; appears only through memory and hallucination
• Key relationships: Anna Fox, Olivia Fox
• Thematic significance: Embodies Anna’s Grief and Trauma and the novel’s obsession with Perception vs. Reality

Who They Are

Ed Fox is the most intimate absence in the book—an ordinary husband and father whose ordinary warmth becomes extraordinary once readers learn he’s no longer alive. For most of the story, he is a tether: the soothing, teasing voice that keeps Anna’s life from unraveling entirely. The twist reveals that this “tether” is a lifeline Anna has tied to herself. Ed is a construct of grief, guilt, and longing, a coping mechanism that lets Anna keep living inside the family she lost. In this way, Ed functions as both comfort and trap: a loving presence that sustains her—and a lie that prevents her from healing, sharpening the novel’s meditation on Perception vs. Reality.

Personality & Traits

Because we meet Ed through Anna’s perception, his traits are tinted by memory, love, and remorse. He reads as funny, steady, and affectionate—but that warmth is shot through with disappointment and boundary-setting, the contours of a marriage under strain. Crucially, even the “facts” of his personality reflect Anna’s needs: he is as gentle or as firm as her psyche requires.

• Jovial, pun-loving warmth: He greets Anna with “slugger” and riffs on “misled” as a “misleading” word that “mizzled” him—corny dad-joke energy that conjures domestic normalcy.
• Caring but firm boundaries: He reminds Anna “too much contact isn’t healthy,” echoing her treatment plan. In her hallucinations, he protects her and also polices her—a projection of the limits she knows she should keep.
• Wounded pride and disappointment: Anna recalls his final, weary refusals and the way betrayal reshaped his tone. The ache in his voice becomes part of her penance.
• Devoted fatherhood: Conversations revolve around Olivia’s costumes, diet, and routines—details that let Anna mother vicariously and keep alive the rhythms of family life.
• Sense-memory intimacy: Anna’s fixation on “razor burn,” “eyebrows,” his “shoes,” and the softness setting on his side of the bed are tactile relics of a marriage; the remembered “broad cliff of his brow near collapse” compresses love, stress, and impending rupture into one image.

Character Journey

Ed doesn’t “develop” so much as he is reinterpreted. Initially, he seems like a patient, slightly distant ex managing life with Olivia while supporting Anna. As the narrative peels back, the story relocates Ed from the world outside Anna’s window to the architecture of her mind. The Vermont trip flashback exposes the break in their marriage—her affair, his decision to leave—while the later revelation of his death forces a re-reading of every cozy call and compassionate admonition. As Anna begins to confront the truth of the accident and her role in it, the fantasy can no longer hold; Ed’s voice thins, then breaks, until acceptance silences it.

Key Relationships

• Anna Fox: With Anna Fox, Ed is both lifeline and labyrinth. Their “conversations” give her structure, intimacy, and the illusion of ongoing family life, yet they also imprison her in the moment before loss, keeping her grief unprocessed. His remembered condemnation—“I do blame you”—becomes the sharp edge of her guilt and the engine of her self-punishment.

• Olivia Fox: With Olivia Fox, Ed represents the intact family Anna longs to restore. In Anna’s hallucinations, Ed is the day-to-day parent, and talk of Halloween costumes and meals becomes a ritual that lets Anna hover at the edges of her daughter’s life. The imagined unit of “Ed and Olivia” is less a picture of them than a portrait of what Anna cannot bear to release.

Defining Moments

Ed’s “moments” are really Anna’s—memories and inventions that define what he means to her and how the story masks the truth.

• Daily phone calls: The warm, routine exchanges—nicknames, jokes, logistical check-ins—sell the illusion of a family separated by circumstance rather than death. Their normalcy is the camouflage that hides the extraordinary unreality underneath.
• The Vermont trip flashback: Anna’s recollection of their last vacation surfaces the real fracture—her affair and his decision to leave—so that love, hurt, and anger coexist in the same memory. This honesty primes the later collapse of the fantasy by restoring complexity to the man Anna has simplified into comfort.
• The revelation of his death: Confirmation that Ed and Olivia died in the crash detonates the reader’s (and Anna’s) assumptions, turning the novel’s Deception and Secrets inward. What looked like support becomes symptom; what felt like connection is revealed as isolation.
• Final remembered words: “I do blame you.” This line concentrates Anna’s self-reproach and gives her hallucination its punitive edge, showing how grief curdles into self-accusation.

Essential Quotes

“Hey there, slugger,” he greets me. “New neighbors?”

A simple pet name carries the full weight of domestic intimacy and routine. By opening on this easy warmth, the novel invites readers to trust Ed’s presence, making the later revelation feel like a betrayal of our own senses as much as Anna’s.

“You need more time,” he says.
I stay quiet.
“The doctors say that too much contact isn’t healthy.”
“I’m the doctor who said that.”

Ed’s voice enforces boundaries that Anna intellectually knows she should keep, collapsing caregiver and beloved into one figure. The circular logic—he quotes her treatment to her—exposes the self-soothing, self-regulating nature of the hallucination.

“I thought of you as the girl next door,” he said sadly, toward the end.

This line reframes Anna through Ed’s eyes: the fantasy of simplicity (“girl next door”) set against the messiness of betrayal and illness. It mourns not only the marriage but the narrative they once believed about themselves.

“The fact is, Anna,” he told me, and I could see the weight in his eyes, that broad cliff of his brow near collapse, “I just can’t take this any longer.”

The sensory detail—his brow like a collapsing cliff—fuses physical image with emotional fatigue. It’s a snapshot of a relationship at breaking point, the moment tenderness and endurance reach their limit.

A pause. And then his voice, softer still. “I do blame you.”

Softness makes the line crueler: it isn’t shouted in anger but offered as verdict. For Anna, this becomes the irreducible kernel of guilt her psyche cannot metabolize, the sentence that keeps Ed alive in her head and her healing on hold.