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Then he pulled out a handgun and shot me in the chest. I was standing on the lawn and I fell. The bullet hole opened wide and my heart rolled out of my rib cage and down into a flower bed. Blood gushed rhythmically from my open wound,
then from my eyes,
my ears,
my mouth.
Cadence in Chapter 2, immediately before summer fifteen and her accidents, vividly demonstrates all of the ways in which her story is both true and untrue simultaneously. Sam, Penny’s husband and Cadence’s father, leaves them. Cadence experiences the loss as the violent annihilation of her very self. The fact that she’s narrating the story tells the reader differently, demonstrating the narrative style that will be the way the reader understands Cadence and her story. Throughout the novel, love is bound up in destruction, and the truth is bound up in lies.
'Don’t you see I would rather be hurt by Gat than be closed off from him?’ I say, sitting up. ‘I’d a million times rather live and risk and have it all end badly than stay in the box I’ve been in for the past two years. It’s a tiny box, Mirren. Me and Mummy. Me and my pills. Me and my pain. I don’t want to live there anymore.'
As Cadence struggles to remember what happened, in Chapter 50, summer seventeen, Mirren warns Cadence that she might be hurting Gat. As she does throughout the book, Cadence has a hard time empathizing with others and claims she’s the one who might get hurt. Although Cadence is undeniably in pain and struggling to get well, she is still an essentially childish character who allows her desperate need for love to dictate her actions. She doesn’t understand all the ways she can be “hurt by Gat,” or “closed off from him.” In fact, it’s unclear what she imagines might happen between them. Her love for Gat is not an altruistic desire to enrich and enlarge him as a person. It seems to be a kind of ownership, driven by selfishness. She, as yet, cannot understand that she will need to overcome her embedded and inherited self-centeredness in order to act in the best interests of others.
I want to take action, I said. There is always the phone, he said.
But what about here? I said. This.
Yes, here, he said. This.
Gat was my love, my first and only. How could I let him go?
In Chapter 71, Cadence in summer fifteen wrestles with the consequences of the aunts’ infighting, specifically their decision to ostracize Gat. Cadence and the Liars have many reasons to take action against Harris. He has traumatized the aunts and torn their families apart. He owns an island to which he has no ethical right, he has smuggled ivory into the country, and there are suggestions of other questionable behavior. But Cadence doesn’t contemplate taking action until she’s threatened with the loss of Gat, whom she describes as her first and only love. The text makes it clear that this description is false. Cadence’s father was her first love, and his loss left her gutted. In using Gat to tend her wounds, she ignores the pain he must have felt at the death of his father, as well as her own pain. Gat reasonably suggests that they have other options, but Cadence wants “here” and “this,” meaning Beechwood Island, where she can possess Gat completely.
