42 pages • 1 hour read
We Were Never Here
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Chapters 44-46Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 44-45 Summary
Still at Emily’s hotel room, Jenny gets a phone call: Kristen is dead. When the two go back to the hospital, Aaron is awake. He explains that he saw the police sketch that CNN released of Paolo’s suspected murderer, and it so resembled Kristen that he began to fear Emily was in danger. He started driving to look for her, figuring they couldn’t have gotten far.
The Phoenix police ask to talk to Emily again, so she returns to the station. This time, they have discovered that she and Kristen were in Chile together and that Kristen came to Phoenix separately from Emily and Aaron. Moreover, several witnesses saw her and Kristen arguing in the hotel lobby. Frightened, Emily leaves the station, and the police let her go as she is not under arrest—yet.
Back at the hospital, Emily tells Aaron the whole truth, explaining all of Kristen’s manipulations, how it was Kristen who actually murdered both Sebastian and Paolo. Aaron believes her and still loves her, but he worries that the police will doubt she truly had no part in killing Paolo.
Chapter 46 Summary
Aaron’s family connects Emily with a good lawyer who crafts a carefully worded statement explaining Kristen and Emily’s actions while evading legal culpability for Emily. The police keep the case open but don’t press charges against Emily. Nevertheless, someone leaks the statement to media outlets, and Emily’s and Aaron’s lives become a media circus while the press and the public wildly speculate about Paolo’s and Kristen’s deaths.
To get away from reporters, Emily stays with her mother for a few months, and although their relationship is still rocky, Emily thinks it might get better without Kristen discouraging her from making any effort. Gradually, Emily realizes that no one has connected her to Sebastian’s disappearance even with all the press attention, so odds are good that no one will ever know that part of the story except herself and Aaron.
Despite everything, Emily mourns Kristen and even misses her. At the same time, however, incriminating evidence increasingly piles up against Kristen. Contrary to what she told Emily, she was fired from her Sydney job not because her position became redundant but because she shoved her boss at a company outing. Also, authorities found Rohypnol, the drug that was found in Paolo’s system in his autopsy, in Kristen’s toiletries bag in Phoenix.
When reporters finally lose interest in hounding her, Emily moves back home. Nine months after Chile, Arizona police drop the case. To celebrate, Emily and Aaron take a trip to Tbilisi, Georgia. At a bar one night, a Bulgarian backpacker sits beside them and introduces herself. She is traveling alone. Emily introduces herself and Aaron as “Dan” and “Joan,” saying, “We just love meeting new people” (300).
Chapters 44-46 Analysis
In the final chapters, the very thing that Emily has feared throughout the novel—finding herself in legal jeopardy and the media’s crosshairs—comes to pass, but the narrative focuses only briefly on that time period. All along, Emily’s foremost conflict was internal rather than external. She had to decide whether she would let her difficult upbringing and traumatic experiences turn her into an angry, manipulative person like Kristen or resist that lure. After momentarily dabbling with a Kristen-like persona on the cliff’s edge, Emily firmly chooses to go her own way, nurturing relationships with Aaron and her mother even as she waits for the legal system to decide her fate.
This is, at least, the course of action she seems to take—until the novel’s final sentence throws Emily’s growth and innocence into question. When Kristen gave Paolo the pair’s fake names at the beginning of the novel, Emily was surprised, annoyed, and somewhat hurt that Kristen would so cavalierly toss out a reminder of the Cambodia trip’s horror. Here, though, Emily does the same thing. Whereas she previously wanted nothing to do with that memory, she now voluntarily evokes it. There are various potential meanings for this twist to the narrative. Perhaps Emily is attempting to dissociate from her trauma and treat it lightly, as Kristen often did. Perhaps she wants to create a feeling of connection with her deceased best friend. Perhaps the part of herself she found on the cliff’s edge—the part that, like Kristen, enjoys controlling and manipulating people—is not as tucked away as she thought it was.
In all likelihood, Emily’s use of the fake name from her former travel does not mean that she plans to go on a murderous spree and kill the lone backpacker—even Kristen, after all, at least had a motive for murdering Paolo. But it does signal that some of the things Kristen brought out in Emily may not be gone after all and that Aaron may have no idea what this relationship has in store. Bartz leaves the ending line equivocal, but no matter how one interprets it, it ensures that the novel’s unsettling tone never fully dissipates. The protagonist has transformed from hesitant, doubtful, and fearful to controlled, self-assured, and confident. Whether this transformation is healthy or dangerously Kristen-like, each reader can decide for themselves.
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