Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses child abuse, sexual assault, and murder.

“Karma has come for her.”

The novel investigates how the moral universe works. Joey, now Paris, sees in her arrest for killing her husband, which she did not do, a fitting logic, as she was never charged for the killing for which her mother was convicted. Her sense of karma in this scenario establishes characterization by highlighting her perception of the moral universe.

“She was attracted to his kindness and his acceptance. Unlike every other man Paris had known, Jimmy Peralta had never asked her for anything.”

At the center of Paris’s complicated love stories is the relationship that she finds with the semi-retired comedian more than twice her age. This foreshadows the novel’s revelations of her dark history of abuse at the hands of two father figures.

“She’s also the woman whose daughter Paris killed nineteen years ago.”

This is the first indication of Paris’s secret life and her criminal past. Paris has thus far been an ambiguous but sympathetic figure, arrested for a crime she did not commit and pilloried in the popular press and social media as a gold digger and a manipulative seductress. This is an obscure admission of guilt for a crime that Joey did and did not commit—here begins the journey into the past.