payment page
Inside were tales from all over the world, variations on variations of familiar stories.
Read them and you hear echoes of one story inside another, then echoes of another inside that. So many have the same premise: once upon a time, there were three.
In Chapter 16, Cadence reminisces about the fairytale collections her father gave her when she was eight, the year Gat came to the island and he and the three cousins became the Liars. Cadence finds in the fairytales a way of making her own story universal and perhaps thus understanding it. She encourages the reader to see how these archetypal stories resonate over time, particularly in the invocation of threes. This is true for the Sinclair aunts, three daughters of Harris who are fighting over an inheritance, and more deeply, their father’s love. In the case of the Liars, evoking the concept of threes forces one of them to become an outsider. The novel suggests that the outsider is Gat because he’s unrelated to the family, he’s a person of color, and he doesn’t join them until summer eight, after which they become the Liars. However, over time, the reader begins to suspect that the outsider might be Cadence, a possibility she elucidates in her fairytale, The Three Beautiful Children and the Witch.
One day I looked at Gat, lying in the Clairmont hammock with a book, and he seemed, well, like he was mine. Like he was my particular person.
Cadence’s most destructive act begins with this seemingly innocuous confession of infatuation, made in Chapter 5, during summer fourteen. Possessions in the novel are problematic and a regular cause of dispute. The aunts are desperate for Harris to finalize his estate, and he plays each of them off of each other, testing their love for him through his money. He has also built houses for each of them and has a large home in Cambridge that the aunts fight over, a conflict that he encourages. Additionally, Penny angers Cadence by ridding their home of any possessions belonging to Sam, her husband and Cadence’s father. Penny then obsessively purchases beautiful objects, following the Sinclair tradition established by Gran, with her ivory statues and her fabric. Cadence responds by making a project of donating her possessions, which Penny and Gat interpret as self-destructive. Cadence cannot recognize her possessive impulse in considering Gat so much her own that she could destroy Clairmont, Beechwood Island, and the Sinclair family if threatened with the loss of him.
‘We set a fire,’ I say, in wonder. ‘We didn’t sob and bleed; we did something instead. Made a change.’
‘Kind of,’ says Mirren.
‘Are you kidding? We burned that fucking palace to the ground.’
When Cadence first remembers what happened to trigger her accident, in Chapter 70 in conversation with the Liars, she assumes that their action was heroic. Cadence has long been aware of the Sinclair family’s flaws, and she is proud that in response she chose not to play the victim. Repeatedly she has told the Lairs that she doesn’t want them feeling sorry for her and that she wants them to treat her normally. Mirren gently reminds her that perhaps Cadence hasn’t yet fully realized what they’ve done. Similarly, for all of Cadence’s protestations to the contrary, she has continued to use her injury and pain as mechanism for pity and self-imposed isolation when it suits her. Her pride here seems misguided and premature. Her phrasing regarding the palace is similar to that she used in an earlier fairytale, which suggests that she is still interpreting her life from a place of fantasy.
I cry because I am the only one of us still alive. Because I will have to go through life without the Liars. Because they will have to go through whatever awaits them, without me.
Cadence remembers what really happened in Chapter 82, and she mourns the destruction she caused. But even at that moment, she remains inescapably solipsistic. Though she is 18, it seems that her emotional maturation has been arrested by the accident. The rest of her life has passed without her, with her only real understanding of a life lived taking place on Beachwood. She mourns for what she has lost, seeming to consider her loss greater than that of the rest of her family. Though this is untrue, it seems like this must be a turning point in Cadence’s recovery and emotional development. Having now accepted who she is and what she has lost, there is hope that she will be able to begin to grieve and heal and live a life that she will be proud to share with the living.
