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After she did the Unforgivable Thing, I stopped caring what she thought.
This line occurs in Chapter 1 when Lucy’s parents drop her off at Baird. CJ gives Lucy a pair of earrings and flinches when Lucy calls her “CJ” rather than “Mom” when thanking her. This moment illustrates how Lucy’s trust in her mother was broken when she saw her in bed with Lucy’s then-crush Gabe. Lucy believes that CJ has never confessed her infidelity to her husband, so Lucy rebels and rejects her mother by calling her CJ. Because Lucy keeps the source of her rage a secret, CJ cannot apologize or otherwise repair their connection. The earrings, like the bottle of vodka she also leaves with Lucy, are a peace offering, an attempt to show her unconditional love for Lucy despite Lucy’s coldness. Throughout the novel, Lucy’s sense of betrayal leaves her too hurt to show her mother mercy, an example of the power of deception to destroy relationships.
Why do you even like him? He’s like, a con artist or something. How do you not see that? What’s happened to you? You’re like a different person than you were. All you do is work out and sit around and pretend to do homework and feel sorry for yourself
During the spring of their sophomore year, Jackie demands to know if Stephen is the reason Lucy stays home from a party. In this scene, Lucy lies to her friends about why she skips the party, just as she hides the truth of her clandestine meetings with Stephen from them. At this point in the book, Lucy’s secrets are piling up, leaving her exhausted. Jackie’s words show that the ways Lucy’s deception is destroying her identity, leaving her a shell of her real self, is not going unnoticed. Lucy’s real reason for skipping the party, as Jackie surmised, is because she wants to avoid Diana, Stephen’s girlfriend. Lucy finds seeing Diana socially while secretly sleeping with Stephen to be overwhelming. Lying to her friends about her reason for skipping the party marks a turning point for Lucy, as she allows deception to damage the basis of her relationships with her closest friends.
“I didn’t know that Dad knew.” My memory wound, my perspective splintering. “I assumed he didn’t know. I thought it was a secret you were keeping from all of us."
Lucy speaks these words to CJ in the final chapter of the book, when she finally confronts her mother about seeing her having sex with Gabe years earlier. In this scene, Lucy learns that her assumptions about CJ’s deception are flawed, and that she, Lucy, is the one whose secrecy damaged relationships within her family. Lucy’s anger was so enduring because she believed CJ kept the affair a secret from Ben, but in this scene, Lucy learns that CJ confessed the truth to her husband immediately and that the two mended their marriage. In contrast, Lucy has kept the secret of her knowledge of the affair for many years, and that deception has left CJ without a way to address her daughter’s fury. While Lucy believed the affair was CJ’s secret, it was in fact her own all along.
