The Heiress

“I don’t know why I’m telling you this part now. I mean, it probably doesn’t even seem all that romantic to you. Cheap college bar, my heart won forever by a free beer and a cute smile, sex on a mattress I’d gotten from Goodwill and suspected someone had died on. But it was romantic. More than that, it was real. And I guess I just want you to know that, before you hear the rest of it. I’m getting ahead of myself, though.”

Jules is explaining how she and Cam met, and in this quote, she places special emphasis on the fact that “it was real.” It is important to Jules that the reader believe in her love for Cam, as later it is revealed that their meeting was planned. Also notable in this quote is Rachel Hawkins’s use of “direct address,” a technique in which a character speaks directly to the reader, creating a connection between the character and the reader. Her need to make the reader believe in her love before “you hear the rest of it” hints that she has secrets, planting doubt about her reliability.

“A pair of camouflage cargo shorts. A seersucker suit Ruby had insisted I buy, khakis, Docksiders, and a fucking bow tie of all things, all remnants of a past life—not so much of the Cam I’d been, but the Cam that Ruby had wanted me to be. Does he still exist, that Cam? Is he tucked somewhere inside my soul, or is he a ghost, wandering the halls of Ashby? I guess I’m about to find out.”

Cam is packing for North Carolina and finds in his closet the clothes from his life there. While the cargo shorts speak to his youth during that time, the seersucker suit and bow tie represent “the Cam that Ruby had wanted [him] to be.” Jules is excited about the prospect of going to Ashby House, but the trip is much more complicated for Cam, who sees himself as literally a different person than he was then, physically represented here by clothes that he no longer wears or likes.

“I had named her ‘Grace,’ but when I said the name, something had passed over Mama’s face, an ugly look like someone had suddenly hit her. ‘I don’t like that name,’ she’d said sharply. ‘What about Kitty?’ I thought Kitty was a stupid name, but Mama so rarely paid attention to me that I’d readily agreed even as I’d known that in my head, I would still call her Grace.”

This quote foreshadows the revelation that Grace was the name of Ruby’s nanny, who left the household soon after Ruby’s disappearance. Ruby’s mother’s lack of attention also foreshadows the revelation that Ruby wasn’t her daughter at all—she has spent Ruby’s childhood mired in alcohol misuse and grief for her lost daughter. Ruby’s acquiescence is notable here because, throughout her life, she uses the impunity of her influence to do exactly what she wants to do; in this case, however, her mother’s attention is worth her acquiescence.

“Guilt is oily and hot in my stomach. Tell him, an insistent voice whispers. Tell him now, while there’s still time. Because if he finds out after you arrive…But we’re almost there. We’re so close now, and soon, everything I’ve done with be worth it. And I will tell him. All of it, the whole story, no lies between us, just like it’s always been. But not now. Not yet.”

Throughout the novel, Jules is duplicitous, but she consistently claims that her actions are in Cam’s best interests. The fact that she is feeling guilty actually supports this claim, even as her actions push back against it. Hawkins creates tension throughout the novel with Jules’s vague implications about her actions and agenda, the full extent of which is only revealed at the end of the novel.

“‘I have no idea what to make of you, Ruby McTavish,’ he said, and until that moment I had never realized that you could feel someone’s voice like a touch. ‘No one does,’ I said. I didn’t say it to be cute. It was just the truth. No one knew what to make of me. I was a rich man’s daughter who hid at parties rather than flirt with available bachelors. I was pretty enough, but there were more beautiful girls. I did well enough in school, but wasn’t a brain. And there was this darkness that seemed to cling to me, a past that people only ever spoke about in whispers. A suspicion, even inside my own heart, that I had been placed in the wrong life, living out a role written for someone else. Maybe it was the darkness that Duke liked.”

Ruby has always felt like an outsider, and her greatest fear is that that feeling is rooted in the fact that she is actually Dora Darnell. To her, her abduction has left a “darkness” around her that people can sense—she senses the same darkness in Duke, which is one of the reasons she is drawn to him. In addition, Ruby is young and naïve, and she mistakes her lust for Duke, in which “you could feel someone’s voice like a touch,” for love.

“Personally, I couldn’t give a shit if tourists came to look—isn’t that why people build places like this, anyway?—but I agreed with Ruby that we shouldn’t make the road smooth. Let all these bumps and jostles and the fear of a blown tire serve as a warning of what they’d find at the top of this mountain. A haunted house where the ghosts hadn’t had the courtesy to die yet.”

Ashby House is isolated, but even so, Ruby’s infamous history sometimes leads the curious to their gate. Here, Cam sees this section of road as a metaphor for the trouble he believes is awaiting him at the house. His reference to the house being haunted draws an immediate reference to Gothic story convention, in which the house features prominently, functioning as another character.

“The pictures I’ve seen on the internet don’t do it justice. It looked gorgeous in 2D, and I could tell it was impressive in scale, but those Google images can’t capture how perfectly the house seems to nestle into its surroundings. The way it looks eternal, immovable. A fortress on a mountain made of thick gray stone and tall windows, surrounded by trees on three sides and behind the house, nothing but treetops and clouds and sky.”

Jules’s first impression of Ashby House isn’t complicated by history the way Cam’s is. However, she has seen Ashby House before—she admits that although she and Cam never talk about his family, she has looked up pictures online, adding more support to the idea that Jules is more invested in the McTavish fortune than she pretends to be. Just as Cam expresses that the house is more than just a house, Jules compares it to a “fortress,” a building designed to protect its residents from outside influence, which is exactly what the McTavish fortune provides to the family.

“I’d always thought there was something about this house that poisoned everyone in it eventually. Turned the good to rot. But there’s too much sunshine in Jules for that to happen to her, and I need to remember that.”

Just as Jules depends on Cam to be a good person, Cam depends on Jules’s straightforward optimism to turn the McTavish family and Ashby House around. Hawkins uses dramatic irony here as the reader knows what Cam doesn’t: that Jules is keeping secrets from him. From his perspective, Jules is happy and straightforward, but he is underestimating her—she has a hidden agenda. Their secrets from each other are amplified by the fact that the narrative switches between their two points of view.

“But as I look into Ruby’s smiling face, I suddenly feel her here. Real. Alive, Watching me. Knowing what’s inside my head right now. And the thing is? I think she’d be proud of me.”

Cam has just seen Ben slip on the stairs and imagines him dying in a pool of blood after falling all the way down. It is an indication of Ruby’s character and her relationship with Cam that he believes that she would be proud of him for having this thought. Ruby’s portrait brings her forcefully into the present, and here, Cam reconnects with her almost as if she is still alive.

“Lucky, I thought, watching the way women watched Duke. Lucky, I thought, every night as he slid down my body, his lips marking places I’d never thought lips would touch. Lucky, I was thinking just seconds before his fist met my cheek for the first time.”

Ruby married her first husband because she mistook love for lust. In this quote, she shows what she values about him—the envy of other women and his sexual experience. The repetition of “Lucky, I thought” lulls the reader before the shift in the third repetition to the first time Duke hit her. Hawkins uses this repetition to make the contrast more impactful, as well as shift Ruby’s story with Duke to a new direction.

“It’s that second shot that makes me a murderer to my mind. The first? I’d been terrorized for weeks at that point, sacred past the point of endurance that night, and I can forgive myself for reaching. Maybe anyone could. I think you can. But the second bullet…that’s when I adjusted my aim. That’s when I knew exactly what I was doing. That’s when I sent a bullet straight into the heart I thought would be mine forever.”

With each of her murders, Ruby rationalizes and parses her actions and their meanings. In her murder of Duke, she recognizes that the first shot was out of fear and anger, while the second had an element of premeditation. This quote also raises the question, again, of who she is writing the letters to. Although it is implied early on that she is writing to Cam, Hawkins will later reveal that Ruby is actually writing to Jules.

“He loved that shit. Not just the mocking—although I’m sure that was very fun—but making sure I knew I came from, as he liked to put it, ‘fucking hillbilly trash, probably.’ Not One of Us. Could’ve been the McTavish family motto.”

While driving to Tavistock with Cam, Ben attempts to explain his bullying when they were younger as an act of jealousy, fed by Nelle and Howell, illustrating The Influence of Family Culture on the Individual. Cam remembers Ben’s behavior in the same way, as part of a larger family culture, but still can’t forgive him for it. Throughout the novel, Cam is Rediscovering the Past From a New Perspective, but he remains steadfastly suspicious of Ben.

“I waited for nightmares to come, for a sudden rush of guilt to prompt me into some drastic action, like throwing myself off one of the bluffs—or, even worse, becoming a nun—but there was nothing of the sort. Well, not nothing. Mostly, I felt empty, a bit numb, and if I’m honest, rather bored. But sometimes when I lay in bed at night, reliving that moment, I felt a strange sort of elation. I’d done that.”

Ruby explains what happened to her after Duke’s death. Her numbness and emptiness could be due to shock, but her boredom, and later, her elation, speak to something else. The boredom can be attributed to the fact that Ruby is not held accountable for her actions—she returns to Ashby House and resumes her life. The elation at the fact that she’d “done that” speaks to Ruby’s characteristic desire to take action.

“‘I did my part,’ he says, his voice low even though there’s no chance of us being overheard. ‘I got him here. Now, Mrs. McTavish. When are you going to do yours?’”

With this quote, Hawkins reveals a major plot twist—Ben is talking to Jules as if they know each other and further, as if they are in league to get Cam to return to Ashby House. Jules hasn’t told the reader what her plan is, but she has been adamant that it is for Cam’s sake. However, this interaction casts doubt on both her credibility and her reliability.

“I know, I know. It looks bad. Me on that trail, Ben revealing I was the reason he asked Camden to come home. The heavy implication that I’d promised something in return. Second-act plot twist, your heroine is actually a potential villain.”

Chapter 11 begins with another incidence of direct address. Whenever Jules is trying to rationalize or explain her actions, she appeals directly to the reader to gain empathy. Her comment about the “[s]econd-act plot twist” alludes to another Gothic convention, in which the hero and the villain are often revealed to be the opposite. Jules’s reference to herself as the hero also subverts traditional Gothic convention, in which the woman is often rescued, rather than the rescuer.

“I hope you never have to watch the one person you love most in the world, the person who loves you just as fiercely in return, lose that love, day by day, bit by bit, steady draining away until there’s nothing left. Until they’re just a person who sleeps inches from you at night, and eats meals across a table from you, and reads books at your side, even smiles at you or laughs with you, but whose heart has shut you out forever.”

After Ruby confesses to Andrew that she killed Duke and Hugh, he withdraws from her. Ruby has been so insulated for so long by the McTavish name that she finds Andrew’s judgment especially hurtful—she hasn’t had to deal with the repercussions of the murders at all until this point. Later, when it is revealed that these letters are written to Jules, this statement becomes more layered—Ruby is warning Jules that the secret she is keeping from Cam may lead to the painful end of their love.

“Jules would’ve fit into one of Libby’s dresses easily, but that’s not what Libby brought her. No, Libby gave her one of Ruby’s old dresses. Not just any dress, either, but one of her favorites, the one she most often wore when we did these dinners when I was growing up.”

This event resembles a famous scene from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, in which the protagonist is tricked into wearing the same costume her husband’s first wife wore the night of her death. The effect is to bring Ruby’s presence into the dining room, where the family is out of sight of the portrait. The implication is that no matter what, Ruby is a constant, outsized presence in the family.

“[S]he’d smiled at that, and reached over, squeezed my hand, her fingers cold, the skin papery thin. You and me…

Against the world, I’d finished. Because it really had been the two of us against everyone, against it all. And even after everything that had happened, there was still a part of me that was instinctually loyal to Ruby, that had sworn to keep her secrets and had chosen to do so, over and over again. Even from my own wife.”

This is something that Ruby used to say when Cam was younger, one of the first good memories that returns to him. Cam doesn’t know that the phrase originated with Andrew, Ruby’s third husband and only love. The last time she said it to Cam was when she told him she wasn’t Ruby McTavish, and she evokes that bond to ensure that he will keep her secret.

“I’d almost given up until the adoption agency I’d hired called. Until I looked into a pair of eyes, one blue, one brown. Sad eyes, like Andrew’s. Camden. My beautiful boy. The one good thing I’ve ever done. Oh, my darling. I can’t wait for you to meet him.”

Ruby is writing the story of how she came to adopt Cam. Like Jules, Ruby is drawn to his heterochromia and his “sad eyes,” finding a connection between Cam and Andrew. Throughout the novel, Hawkins leads the reader to believe that Ruby is writing the letters to Cam as he is positioned as the character she most trusts. However, when she expresses a desire that the recipient meet Cam, it becomes suddenly clear that she is writing to someone else, adding another layer to the story.

“I have given you every privilege, every advantage, everything that every McTavish has had since the first one showed up here three hundred years ago. And every McTavish since then has grown more self-centered, more uncaring. Not a one of them should have this. But you, my darling boy? She had gotten into bed, folding her hands on top of the sheets. You are my redemption.”

Ruby is explaining to Cam that she adopted him to mold him into a “good person” so that the McTavish fortune would be given to someone worthy of it, and taken from the family. She has taken enough pills to die by suicide and is imposing a test of character on Cam—if he is the good person she believes him to be, he will call the ambulance; if not, he will let her die and be free of her expectations. Ruby’s manipulations, however, become her downfall, as Cam is desperate enough not to intercede in her death. This passage explores the theme of What Makes a Good Person.

“Jules is my family. Jules, who sees the darkest parts of me, the worst thing I ever did, and loves me anyway. Just like I see the darkest parts of her, the worst thing she’s ever done, and love her, too. She doesn’t know it, though. Oh, she knows I love her. It’s the rest of it. The darkest parts, the worst things.”

Cam reveals to the reader that he has known all along about Jules’s agenda in their relationship. He believes in Jules’s love so completely that it lends credibility to what Jules has been claiming all along—that she is acting in Cam’s best interest because she truly loves him.

“But she can’t hide from me. Maybe one day she’ll tell me the truth. Maybe not. Maybe she’ll wait until she’s in her seventies, and then she’ll write me a long stack of letters, letters that are actually for me this time.”

With his comment, Cam draws a parallel between Ruby and Jules, drawing attention to the similarities between them. However, the irony is that he is keeping secrets from her as well by not telling her he knows the truth. His reference to Ruby’s letters and the pointed reminder that they weren’t written to him betrays a note of jealousy that Ruby wrote the letters to Jules and not him.

“We’re made up of many different types of people, is my point. Good ones, bad ones. Most of them, like me, probably fall somewhere in the middle. That gives me hope for the little girl currently floating around inside me. Camden is good, through and through. Me? Only middling. But surely that gives her a better chance than most.”

Over the course of the novel, Jules develops a more nuanced understanding of human nature as she probes the idea of What Makes a Good Person. However, even though she comes to understand that human nature is nuanced, she still claims that Cam is “good, through and through.” Jules needs to believe that his goodness will balance out her flaws, but in the process, she places him outside her assessment of human nature.