Before She Disappeared

Angelique is the missing teenage girl Frankie is trying to save. A reference to angels, Angelique’s name signals that she is both innocent and beloved. For Frankie, Angelique represents redemption. Angelique is a savior figure who tries to save the people she loves, like Livia and her brother. Angelique also represents impartial justice. She didn’t save her father from the earthquake, judging him unworthy of salvation. Her ruthlessness in reflected in what Emmanuel tells Frankie—that Angelique doesn’t dream, she plans. Her idealism is hardened by cynicism instilled by hardship. Earthquakes affect even the innocent, and there are people like her father who add to the evil of the world, and the world is better without them.

Angelique is a foil for Frankie. They both have the drive to save the weak, to help and to restore balance to a broken world, but Angelique’s motive is purer. She has never fallen from grace, whereas Frankie is trying to redeem herself for past sins. Angelique’s involvement in the criminal enterprise, even to save her friend Livia, compromises her, though her motives are initially pure. She fails to save Livia because she got into a dangerous situation she couldn’t control. Frankie tries to do for Angelique what Paul tried to do for Frankie, to assure her that the deaths of the people she couldn’t help weren’t her fault. This interaction is highly ironic, given Frankie’s inability to accept her own advice. Frankie’s interactions with Angelique expose the shortcomings in Frankie’s character and the impact of Frankie’s past trauma.

Emmanuel is Angelique’s younger brother. Continuing the novel’s religious symbolism, Emmanuel’s name means “God is with us,” and he represents virtue and justice in a fallen world. During the case, both Frankie and Angelique try to shield him from the evils of the world and only partly succeed. He too is a savior, doing everything he can to find and rescue his sister. Emmanuel serves an important function in the narrative because he is the only person able to read the clues Angelique drops. He saves Angelique without losing his own innocence, retaining his sense of hope enough to keep Angelique “alive” on the internet, bringing her to Frankie’s attention.

In the past, Frankie’s experience with law enforcement is that they are too quick to dismiss missing persons when they come from marginalized communities. Lotham represents a different approach to policing. He never gave up on Angelique, but he ran into a dead end with the investigation. He at first resents Frankie for thinking she can come in and solve a case that he couldn’t solve himself, but he cares too much about Angelique to reject any possible resource.

He is a member of the community he protects, and he sees them all as complex individuals rather than faceless stereotypes. Lotham grieves Livia’s death because she was abandoned by society. No one seemed to care, not even her mother, who never reported her disappearance.

Like Frankie and Angelique, Lotham is a saver of lost and broken people. He uncovers Frankie’s past and recognizes that she wasn’t at fault for Paul’s death. He is a foil for Paul, as he offers Frankie the emotional care she needs but doesn’t feel she deserves. Just as Frankie could not accept Paul’s sacrifice on her behalf, she cannot accept Lotham’s affection.

Paul’s backstory and relationship to Frankie is not revealed until the novel’s end. He was her boyfriend who helped her get sober but left when she couldn’t let go of her obsession with finding missing people. He later married Amy, but he came when Frankie called him to stop her from drinking after the girl she was looking for was killed.

Paul is another savior figure in the novel. As he is dying, Paul is still trying to save Frankie, telling her not to blame herself and not use his death as an excuse to drink. Frankie nevertheless sees his death as the result of her weakness. If she hadn’t been in a liquor store, hadn’t called him to help her walk away without drinking, he wouldn’t have been there when the store was robbed.

As part of her atonement, Frankie tries to take up his mantle of saving people who are lost. She also honors Paul’s last request to her—that she not go back to drinking.

Paul created a deep emotional wound in Frankie. His final words were an assertion that Amy, not Frankie, saved him and it was Amy, not Frankie, whom he loved. This shatters Frankie because she still loved Paul, and this wound has kept her from forming a romantic relationship with anyone else.

Livia is Angelique’s friend, a technical genius, and a member of a troubled family. She is a flat, static character meant to reflect the novel’s social commentary on racial inequality and social injustices. Part of the novel’s social commentary, Livia represents the demographic most likely to be dismissed by law enforcement and society. She comes from a poor family with criminal connections and a household where her own mother thinks she isn’t safe.

Livia’s world is filled with moral ambiguities. She loves her brothers, who draw her into criminal activity. Her mother loves her but is unwilling to report her disappearance because of her family’s illegal activities. Livia represents the victim that Frankie is usually unable to save; by the time she solves the mystery, it is too late.

Deke is Livia’s older brother and another character who foregrounds the novel’s social commentary. He was a ruthless criminal, and he was trying to finance a counterfeiting scheme via armed robbery before his arrest. On his release, however, he wanted to reconnect with his family. JJ and his mother refuse to speak to him, but Livia, who is the only member of the family who might speak to him. Deke has been corrupted to the extent that although he loves his sister, he sees nothing wrong with introducing her to criminals, believing he can protect her. When he realizes that the situation has gotten out of his control, and his sister is dead as a result, he sacrifices himself to try to save Angelique and Emmanuel. Frankie stays with him as he dies, recognizing that like herself, he has made many mistakes but is capable of love and sacrifice.