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Summary: Chapter 49
Cadence and Gat finally have an open conversation. Gat is annoyed with Cadence over her complaining and sympathy-seeking. She leads a privileged life, he says, that includes things like a trip to Europe paid for by her Granddad (not her father). Cadence accepts what Gat says, but she pleads that the pain of the migraines sometimes just makes her want to die.
Summary: Chapter 50
Mirren continues to feel sick. She counsels Cadence not to keep trying to resume her relationship with Gat, because it will end in hurt for both of them. Mirren confesses to having made up stories about having a boyfriend of her own.
Summary: Chapter 51
When Cadence rejoins the Liars after a two-day migraine, they talk about a beloved donut shop. Oddly, the others say things Cadence knows to be false.
Summary: Chapter 52
Gat comes into Cadence’s room and sees the wall on which she has been posting clues about her accident. He comes clean about his other relationship. That night, Cadence again sees Carrie sleepwalking, and she hears Will cry out during a nightmare.
Summary: Chapter 53
Cadence wants to give Johnny a box of Legos, but he has lost interest. At his suggestion, she gives them to the younger cousins.
Summary: Chapter 54
The Liars go kayaking, even though Mirren is ill, and Cadence is supposed to be careful due to her head injury. Ignoring the others’ warnings, Cadence follows Johnny and Gat in a dangerous jump from rocks into the water. She resurfaces safely but wonders about alternate realities where she was killed or something else turned out differently.
Summary: Chapter 55
That night, Cadence wakes from sleep with a memory of Carrie running and crying hysterically. Finding Mirren on the front porch, Cadence insists on knowing what occurred before her accident. Mirren won’t say much but doesn’t challenge Cadence’s speculation about being the victim of some sort of attack or tragedy.
Summary: Chapter 56
In the morning, Cadence finds a new tire swing in front of her house, to replace the one gone from Granddad’s lawn. Inside is a gift of dried roses from Gat.
Summary: Chapter 57
Cadence tells another story about a king with three daughters. The younger two gave birth to girls. The oldest gave birth to twin boys, one of which was a mouse. He was tidy and clever, but everyone was disgusted with him, so he left to see the world. Someday, he thought, maybe he would come back and burn the palace to the ground.
Analysis
Gat seems to finally get past Cadence’s reflexive defensiveness as he reminds her of her special place among the Harris grandchildren. Cadence is too self-absorbed to realize that her father could never afford to pay for a European tour, and that Harris must have arranged all of it, setting her apart from her cousins and Gat. Here again, Gat serves to force Cadence to rethink the story she tells about herself, even as she insists on the supremacy of her own understanding, even as it compromised by pain and memory loss. The Liars continue to remind her that they have suffered too, but she suspects they are lying, ignoring the irony as she has told the reader from the start that the cousins are known as the Liars and that she is lying to the reader. However, it serves to heighten the tension as the reader approaches to the novel’s conclusion. Finally, Gat describes his simultaneous feelings of being wrong and being wronged and his inability to decipher which feeling is right, in regard to his romantic relationships, echoing Cadence’s ambivalence in the way she wants to be treated.
The trip to the rock outcropping puts Cadence in the precarious position of having to live her motto, even as everyone involved in the trip knows that it is dangerous to do so, in keeping with her understanding of the accident that has left her with memory loss. As she plummets into the water, she repeats the same language she used to describe her accident, about seeing the base of Beechwood Island with numb limbs and cold fingers. Her assertion that she is fine and that no one should worry about her is at odds with her repeated insistence that she needs to have accommodations because of her headaches and memory loss, suggesting that her accident involved a far darker truth than she has yet revealed.
Cadence’s fairytale in Chapter 57 is far darker than any of the others because it involves retribution. Like the one told in Chapter 40, this one focuses on the grandchildren of the king rather than the daughters. The baby mouseling is clearly the outsider Gat, not only because he is an outsider and viewed as subhuman but also because he’s “smarter and more curious” than his cousins. His ostracization foreshadows a truth that Cadence isn’t ready to face. And the tale’s ending foreshadows the novel’s conclusion for the reader.
