Confessions on the 7:45

This chapter goes back in time to when Pearl and Charlie are running away after Charlie’s con with Bridget goes wrong. They are driving back east, and he promises that their next home will be the place where they finally settle down. He apologizes for his distant and cold moods and tells her a little more about his father, who died in jail and was a violent man. He taught him that you can't trust anyone, even people who are supposed to love and protect you.

He tells Pearl that her father did the same thing and reveals that he knows who he is. He encourages her to reach out to him because he owes her for not being there for her. He guesses that he would pay a lot of money to keep her existence a secret. They finally pull into a long driveway and arrive at a house; Pop announces that they are home.

Hunter Ross is still preoccupied with his cold cases; he never wants to forget about people who disappeared into thin air. After working in the criminal justice system for 25 years, he understands exactly how broken the system is and how easy it is for people to slip through the cracks.

He is talking to Andrew, one of the retired men from the diner, who has offered to accompany him during his investigative work. Their efforts have not yielded any new information, and Hunter drops Andrew off before going home himself. His wife is not there, and he digs up the box he keeps with information about Stella and Pearl’s case. He knows that the person who called himself Charlie Finch is a con man; all of his documentation is falsified.

A couple of years after Charlie and Pearl disappeared, another woman was reported dead and her daughter missing. Their names were Maggie and Grace Stevenson. Maggie met a man on a dating site and was eager to meet him for the first time before she was murdered in her home. Ross found that she had withdrawn thousands of dollars from her savings account the day she was killed, and there was DNA evidence at her house that matched DNA from the Behrs’ house. He knows there has to be a connection between the two cases, but he keeps running into dead ends. As he studies a photo of Maggie and Grace, he wonders if Grace could actually be Geneva.

Ross also reviews the file he has on Charles Finch. Charlie’s cons follow a pattern of preying on vulnerable single women who are desperate for love. Many women who are victims of a scam like that are too ashamed to speak about it, but Bridget was willing to talk about her experience. Ross interviewed her after it happened, and he believes the man who tried to scam her, who went by Bill Jackson and had a daughter, was probably Charlie. He digs around in his notes, looking for something that will bring these separate incidents together.

Selena is in her home with the shades drawn; now that Geneva’s disappearance has been on the news, her yard is full of reporters wanting to talk to her. She feels panicky and is thinking about packing to stay with her mom when there is a knock at the door. She does not answer it until she realizes it’s her friend Beth.

Up until this point, Selena has not told Beth anything about what happened over the last week. Beth demands to know everything, and Selena tells her, leaving nothing out. She reflects that she knows so many women who have had problems in their marriages that she didn’t know about until after they divorced.

Beth believes that Will is still in love with Selena but reminds her that she wasn’t completely happy with him before she met Graham. He tended to be controlling and condescending, almost father-like in his desire to take care of her. The women have been through a lot together over the years, and Beth reminds Selena that she is “Iron Woman” and will be able to get through this.

After Beth leaves, Will arrives. He updates her on Graham’s questioning; he says that Graham’s story has stayed consistent and there still isn’t any evidence against him. Selena asks Will if he really thinks that Graham hurt Geneva, and while he doesn’t know, he also doesn’t trust him. He helps Selena pack and accompanies her to her mom’s house. He tells her that he wishes he had gone to the party where she had met Graham many years ago; he still has feelings for her, and the current situation with Graham only reinforces that she had made a mistake leaving him. Selena is not willing to entertain thoughts about their past relationship given her current circumstances.

At the end of the chapter, Will gets a phone call at Cora and Paulo’s house. He tells Selena that the police found a dead body in a nearby state park, near a trail where Graham sometimes runs. The body is so battered that they cannot determine if it is Geneva, but Selena knows that things have escalated, and she is more afraid than ever.

This chapter skips back in time to when Pearl and Pop settle down after fleeing the Bridget fiasco. There is a distance between them now, and they often run scams and just live their lives separately from each other. Pearl has enrolled in a community college and doesn’t get involved in Pop’s cons.

One day, they are discussing the possibility of Pearl trying to connect with her father. They have gathered information on him and found that he is married, has two daughters, and has an important job; if she shows up, he would probably pay her a lot of money to not reveal that he slept with her mother. Eventually, she texts him: “I am Pearl. Do you know who I am?” (263). She waits for days and doesn’t get a response. This makes her more desperate to hear from him, and she begins stalking her father and his family, watching them from outside of their house and following them around town.

One evening, she sees her father pull into his driveway, and they make eye contact before he goes inside. He does not acknowledge her in any other way. Though she has been calm and collected about finding her father, now she is angry for both herself and her mother. From her car, she screams and cries until she is exhausted and then goes back home. Later that night, she gets an email from her father. It says, “Yes. I know you. Should we meet?” (266).

This chapter jumps ahead to the present timeline. Anne is charging three of her phones and thinking that once she wraps up her cons of Selena and Ben, she wants to quit that lifestyle and just live as one person. She is still texting Ben, telling him that she hasn’t been in touch because her sister overdosed, and Pop can tell that she has developed feelings for him. She considers going to be with him and truly becoming the woman he is looking for and she has been pretending to be.

Pop laughs at her, not really believing that Anne will ever stop conning. He asks her who she really is and what she wants, and he warns her that if she digs too deep inside herself, she might not like what she finds.

Oliver is thinking about how stupid his brother, Stephen, is while he watches him sleep. Stephen is snoring loudly without a care in the world, and Oliver is jealous because he notices and worries about everything. He is frustrated because he knows something is wrong, but none of the adults will give him complete answers to his questions.

That night, he heard his mom crying in the other room after she put him to bed. Now, he creeps into the room to get in bed with her, only to find that she is gone. He gets his iPad out of his room and goes downstairs to look for her. Instead, finds his grandmother, Cora. She says that she woke up when she heard Selena leave the house. Oliver is concerned about his mother being out at night by herself because he has never been allowed to do such a thing. He asks Cora questions about his parents and Geneva, none of which she can answer. She promises that sometime soon, they will all sit down and talk about what is going to happen to their family.

Oliver senses that whatever problems his parents are having are related to Geneva’s disappearance. He tells Cora that he recorded Geneva the night she left, which he has not shared with anyone until now. He shows her the video, and Cora has an unexpectedly strong reaction to seeing the person that Geneva encounters in the video. Before she can explain to Oliver who the person is, Selena comes home and asks them what is wrong.

Pop brings home a trembling, timid, teenage girl named Gracie. Pearl does not like this new addition to the family; she feels as though Pop is replacing her with someone new to teach. He insists that he brought Gracie there because she needs some help and he wants Pearl to have a sister. Gracie is crying and so distraught that she vomits; Pop asks Pearl to clean it up, and Gracie goes into a bedroom to calm down. Pearl considers leaving and going to stay with her boyfriend, Jason, who calls her Elizabeth and attends her community college.

Since the chapter where she stalked her father, she met him and blackmailed him to stay quiet about his affair with her mother. After getting the money, however, she didn’t let it go. She made sure that everyone knew the truth and it ruined his life. It was revealed that he had many affairs and children with other women. He also sexually harassed women at work, where he was the CEO of his company.

Pop disapproves of the way Pearl handled the con; he would have taken the money and run, but she sought revenge. She accuses Pop of being insecure because she is better at conning than he is, and he wants someone new to teach who will adore him. She packs her things to go stay with Jason, and Pop tells her to come back and have dinner with them on Sunday, insisting that she still has a place in their family.

The timeline returns to the moment when Selena returns to her mother’s house and finds Cora and Oliver watching the video. Cora is visibly shaken, and Selena sends Oliver to bed so they can talk about the video. Selena asks Cora if she knows who is talking to Geneva in the video, and Cora asks if Selena knows her. Selena looks at the video and recognizes her: It is Martha. She tells her mother that she met her on the train not long ago. Cora has a difficult time telling Selena how she knows this person.

Cora thinks about all the times she saw the person years ago, then just a young girl, hanging out around their house and various places around town. Cora remembers feeling angry when she realized who the girl was, not just because she knew she was her unfaithful husband’s child but because he had clearly abandoned her. This reinforced her feeling that her husband was not a good person.

Finally, Cora gathers her emotions and tells Selena the truth: that young woman is her half-sister and her real name is Pearl.

The timeline jumps back again. Pearl is sleeping at Jason’s place when her phone rings in the middle of the night. Since Gracie joined her “family,” she has not been living at Pop’s house. Even though he has sent her emails begging her to come home, she refuses. She is enjoying her stable, “normie” life as a college student and girlfriend. All of that disappears, however, when she answers her phone.

Gracie is calling her and sounds panicked. She tells Pearl that she needs to come home right away and that she doesn’t know what to do. She doesn’t explain anything, but Pearl understands this must be an emergency and rushes home, leaving Jason asleep in his bed.

When she arrives, she sees Gracie slumped over on the porch. Pearl asks if she’s hurt, and she shakes her head but is too stunned to say or do anything else. Pearl goes into the house and sees two dead bodies in pools of blood. One is Pop, and the other is Bridget.

Gracie explains that Bridget showed up with a gun, and she killed her by throwing a heavy jade bookend at her head, but Bridget shot and killed Pop before she died. Gracie asks Pearl what “they” are going to do, and at first, Pearl is taken aback that she automatically assumed Pearl would get involved. However, she knows Pop would want them to stick together as the sisters he hoped they would be.

Pearl quickly jumps to action. They need to find Bridget’s car, get rid of the bodies, and make sure there aren’t any clues on Bridget’s phone that would lead someone to suspect she was there. Gracie listens carefully and becomes less afraid. Pearl can see that she is stronger than she gave her credit for and now understands why Pop took her in. They will sort out this mess and stick together now that Pop is gone.

The timeline shifts forward. Selena is angry that Cora never told her and her sister, Marisol, that they had a half-sister—maybe even more than one half-sibling. Cora is much closer to Marisol, who has always been more understanding and forgiving toward Cora for everything in their past. Even now, with Selena dealing with her own family issues, she is hard on Cora and judges her for how she handled her marriage problems.

Selena tells Cora that she told Pearl about Graham cheating on her, and she wonders if she has been stalking her for years. Cora believes that she seems more intent on seeking revenge and ruining their lives than on getting money from her father. Selena, on the other hand, hopes that if she can give Pearl whatever she is after, maybe she will go away. She texts the person she thought was Martha: “I know who you are, Pearl. So just tell me what you want” (302). Then, Selena leaves and tells her mother that if she doesn’t hear from her in two hours, she should call Will and the police and tell them everything they know about Pearl.