42 pages • 1 hour read
Andrea BartzWe Were Never Here
Andrea BartzFiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 18-22Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 18-19 Summary
On the morning of Kristen’s 30th birthday, a bouquet of lilies arrives for her. Reading the accompanying note, she quickly realizes that the gift is the first in a series of clues Kristen has crafted for a scavenger hunt. As the hunt continues at work, Emily finds that Kristen roped Aaron and even her boss into the plot. Kristen suggested to Aaron that he gift Emily a wallet almost identical to one she lost in Chile. She even managed to get Emily one and a half days off from work. When Emily heads home early to start her time off, she sees Kristen waiting in a car outside; she has organized a long weekend trip to Nana and Bill’s lake house.
Emily loves the lake house, but she is annoyed that Kristen hijacked her birthday weekend plans with Aaron. Imagining that Aaron must have felt obligated to assent to Kristen’s plan, Emily thinks back to Kristen’s involvement in her past relationships. When she brings up her final text conversation with her ex, Colin, still on her phone, she is disturbed to find that Colin comes across as reasonable, while her own texts, dictated to her almost word for word by Kristen, seem overreactive and terse.
When Kristen hands Emily her phone to select some music for the road, Emily sees a text from a real estate broker notifying Kristen of her approval for a lease at an apartment building a mere block and a half away from Emily.
Chapters 20-22 Summary
At the lake house, Emily confronts Kristen about how strange she’s been acting since Chile. Kristen finally breaks down, saying she’s felt that Emily blames her for Paolo’s death, even though she, Kristen, supported Emily after Sebastian’s death. Emily feels a rush of guilt and comforts Kristen, glad to finally understand Kristen’s feelings.
When Emily connects to the house’s Wi-Fi, however, her good mood is ruined: Nana has sent her an email with a CNN article about Paolo’s remains being found in Chile, and she says that this is why the friends must be careful on their trips. The story alarms Emily, while Kristen seems unconcerned. The article says that Paolo was an American, and his wealthy family has committed their vast resources to investigating his murder. The family cannot fathom who would have done such a thing to Paolo, a well-loved cancer survivor.
The next day, the pair visit an antiques store in town. The store owner, who knew Kristen in childhood, comments that Emily looks a lot like Kristen’s childhood best friend, Jamie. As Kristen wanders away to peruse the store, the owner confides in Emily that Jamie died tragically young but provides no further details. Emily tries to sensitively ask Kristen for more details back at the house, but Kristen doesn’t want to talk about Jamie and merely states that her death was an accident.
Chapters 18-22 Analysis
In this series of chapters, Kristen’s boundary violations reach new heights that would be upsetting even without the component of the Chile secret. Asking for vacation time for a birthday trip sounds more like something a parent would ask a teacher on behalf of a child than something a friend would ask a boss on behalf of a friend. Kristen clearly wants to be everything to Emily—best friend, mother, protector, confidant, and co-conspirator. While Emily, a person not close to her own family of origin, has been happy to let Kristen fill all these roles through most of their friendship, she increasingly finds herself less willing to engage in this kind of smothering friendship.
Emily’s re-evaluation of her breakup with Colin marks an important shift in her dynamic with Kristen. Whereas, before, she took Kristen’s opinions of her boyfriends as gospel truth, she now questions them, holding them up to the light of increased self-awareness to see them as they really are. Kristen’s dismissiveness of Colin, Emily realizes, was less about Colin and more about wanting to separate Emily from any other important relationship. Based on the details the reader has, Kristen was fully justified in objecting to Ben, Emily’s first long-term boyfriend. For this reason, readers can understand how Emily was thereafter inclined to trust Kristen rather than her own instincts about men. Emily’s readiness to trust her own instincts about Aaron reveals that she has grown into a stronger person throughout her twenties, and it is this very strength that Kristen wants to reverse.
As the two women spend time at Nana and Bill’s lake house, the book’s tone takes an even more menacing turn. Kristen effectively isolates Emily in a remote area and begins to act evasive about her own past. Emily starts to realize Kristen is not who she, Emily, thought she was, but the protagonist is in a location where she is not safe to fully voice her concerns. It is also significant that Kristen chose to take Emily to a place that Kristen used to share with her deceased childhood best friend. Though she resists discussion about Jamie, Kristen’s choice of location and Emily’s physical resemblance to Jamie raise troubling implications about Kristen trying to re-create a long-gone friendship through Emily.
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