42 pages • 1 hour read
We Were Never Here
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Chapters 6-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary
Emily passes out briefly, but when she wakes up, Kristen tells a story of Paolo attacking her that sounds remarkably similar to Sebastian’s attack: He gradually grew too rough and eventually hit her head against the wall while overpowering her. She hit him over the head with a bottle of wine to save herself, and he bled out from the injury.
Just like in Cambodia, Emily raises the possibility of calling the police and telling them the truth, but Kristen objects that they can’t trust local authorities to believe them. Emily quickly realizes she must be the level-headed one who finds a solution this time, just like Kristen did for her in Cambodia. They decide to bury the body in secret, as they did with Sebastian.
Chapters 7-9 Summary
With many exits to the hotel unsupervised and almost no guests staying there, Kristen and Emily manage to haul Paolo out to their rented car. With his body in the trunk, they drive until they reach a remote, desert-like area. Kristen makes Emily get out of the car and scout out the area while she drives ahead to make sure the area has no passing traffic that will surprise them.
Emily briefly fears that Kristen has abandoned her there, but Kristen returns soon, and the two set to work digging a grave with shovels they stole from the hotel’s maintenance shed. After a grueling five hours, their task is done, and they just barely make it back to the hotel in time to replace the shovels before anyone notices. In their room before checking out of the hotel, they clean the scene as well as they can with all the makeup remover wipes and hand wipes they have. Emily is terrified, but Kristen assures her that, as white women, they are not the type of people anyone would suspect of murder.
Chapters 10-11 Summary
When Emily’s plane lands in Milwaukee, and she begins walking toward the airport exit, she hears a familiar but unexpected voice calling her name: Aaron, surprising her with an airport pickup.
Emily struggles to act normal; her movements are slow and painful after the long night of digging, and her nerves are frayed. She explains her soreness by saying she and Kristen went on a strenuous hike the day before. When she finally arrives home, she finds she has a bizarrely normal, cheerful text from Kristen about how great the trip was. She decides Kristen must be trying to create a paper trail of normalcy in case authorities begin monitoring them.
After a miserable day at work spent constantly refreshing the CNN website to see if news about Paolo has surfaced yet, Emily calls Kristen, ready to provide a sympathetic ear. Again, though, Kristen acts strangely upbeat, even suggesting another six-month backpacking trip. Dumbfounded, Emily again declines.
Chapters 6-11 Analysis
Observant readers might notice that Kristen’s account of her sexual assault sounds uncannily similar to Emily’s, even down to the detail of Paolo knocking her head against the wall. While Emily tries to steel herself to take the lead in the cover-up just like Kristen did for her, Kristen does not seem quite as shaken as Emily was immediately after Sebastian’s death. For instance, she has the presence of mind to drive around a bend in the road to check that the pair are secluded. This presence of mind is not in itself damning; different people handle shock differently. However, when combined with a slew of other clues that begin to accumulate in coming chapters, Kristen’s reaction grows more significant. She is at least as aware and alert as she was after Sebastian’s death, if not more so.
As Emily and Kristen bury the body and clean up their hotel room, they encounter a string of almost unbelievably lucky breaks. First, they quickly and easily find shovels in a hotel maintenance closet. Second, the hotel has so few guests that they can drag a grown man’s bloody corpse outside with no witnesses. Third, they happen to have so many hand wipes and makeup removal wipes that they can clean the whole hotel room of Paolo’s blood. Taken as a composite, these details are not simply facts that push the boundaries of the story’s verisimilitude. Rather, they mirror the pair’s extreme luckiness in being young, attractive white women. Because of these identities, they know they are unlikely to fall under suspicion of murder without ample convincing evidence.
The real-life story they mention, Amanda Knox’s story, further proves this point. Knox was imprisoned for a crime for which she was eventually exonerated, and her story became a media sensation, but the reason for its popularity was Knox’s superficial profile as an atypical murderer. News stories of male murderers are so much more common that media outlets tend to gravitate toward a female murderer story, especially when that murderer is a young, attractive, white female—a person often viewed by society as particularly harmless. When Kristen tries to calm Emily by describing this automatic advantage, she is not incorrect. Despite the pair’s sloppy cover-up, they are hardly anyone’s idea of prime murder suspects.
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