Confessions on the 7:45

Jumping back in time, Pearl and Gracie are dealing with the aftermath of Pop and Bridget’s murders. They dig a shallow grave, put the bodies in, and cover them with lye so their tissues will break down. They scrub the floors, wash their clothes, and shower to get off all of the blood and dirt.

Pearl knows someone who can get rid of Bridget’s car, so she calls him and follows his instructions so he can take it apart and sell the parts. She also checks Bridget’s phone and makes sure that she has not left any digital footprints that could lead anyone to Pop’s house. She sees that Bridget did not have a lot of friends or family, and she writes one Facebook post from Bridget’s account saying that she is going to travel the world.

Through this experience, Pearl gets to know Gracie a little better. She learns that she is 15 years old and that her mother was murdered like Stella. They both wonder whether Pop killed their mothers, and while they don’t know for sure, it does seem possible. Now Pearl can see some of the strength and intelligence in Gracie that Pop must have seen when he took her in.

Gracie tells Pearl that she wants to stay with her, and Pearl agrees. Gracie says that Pop had changed her name; he was calling her Gennie, short for Geneva.

After talking to her father about Pearl, Selena goes to her own house. On the drive between these two houses, she thinks about how Graham is so similar to her father and wonders whether she subconsciously chose Graham because they are alike. She goes into the house and changes her clothes and then looks for a box she hid that contains money and a gun. She has saved $5,000 over the years and knows that she will need it. When she opens the box, she sees that more than half of the money and the gun are gone. She takes what is left and is worrying about where the gun is when Will calls.

Will tells her that the body the police found is not Geneva but another woman who went missing. Selena is relieved at first, but then Will tells her that the woman is Jacqueline Carson. She doesn’t know why she recognizes that name, but Will explains that she is a woman who worked with Graham and reported him for sexual harassment. Will tells her that Graham was released by the police, and he doesn’t know where he is, so Selena should get out of her house and go back to her mom’s.

Just then, Selena hears noises in her house and knows it must be Graham. She goes downstairs to confront him, still hoping that this is all a misunderstanding and that Pearl is behind all of the horrible things that are happening.

Selena finds Graham in the kitchen drinking bourbon. She asks him what he has done, and he protests that he never hurt anyone. She reminds him of how he beat up the woman in Las Vegas, and he says that she was a stripper, implying that makes her less human or deserving of respect. Selena tells Graham that the police have identified Jacqueline Carson’s body, and Graham acts surprised. Selena notices that the missing gun is now on the kitchen counter.

She edges away from Graham, and he taunts her, asking her if she plans to take the boys and leave him. He says she’ll probably get back together with Will within months. As he continues to gaslight her and swear that he had nothing to do with the missing and dead women, she becomes enraged. She finally allows herself to unleash it and charges at Graham, knocking him down and punching him.

Graham flips them over so he is pinning her down and slaps her hard. She kicks him in the groin, which buys her just enough time to scramble to her feet and try to get to the door. He grabs her ankle and pulls her to the ground again, banging her head on the wood floor. He squeezes his arms around her neck, and Selena is sure he will kill her.

Selena is on the floor and Graham is trying to choke her to death. Her vision is starting to blur and get dimmer. Memories of her sons flood through her brain, and her eyes rest on a picture of them. If Graham is going to kill her, she wants the picture of them to be the last thing she sees.

Suddenly, Graham’s grip becomes loose, and Selena gasps for air. Graham looks stunned and collapses to the ground, hitting his head on the floor. When Selena gets up and looks around, she sees Pearl, her half-sister, who has saved her by hitting Graham in the head with the gun.

Pearl didn’t kill Graham, but she knocked him out long enough to save Selena. Selena asks Pearl why she is trying to ruin her family and says she, Marisol, and Cora would have welcomed her into their family, but she’s not sure if that’s true. She offers Pearl the $2,000 in her pocket and says she can get more if she names the price it will cost for her to go away.

Pearl admits that at first, she was planning to get money and revenge from them because she thought Selena’s life was perfect and that she needed to experience some consequences. However, the more she followed them and learned about her family, Pearl realized that Selena’s life is not perfect and that Graham is a very bad person. Selena, who is only beginning to understand exactly how bad he is, wonders what Pearl knows that she doesn’t. Pearl says, “I saw him. I know what he did” (340), which Selena understands to mean that Graham killed Jacqueline Carson.

Selena tells Pearl that she knows everything that happened to her and that she sees and understands her. Pearl smiles, and Selena feels a strange connection to her. Selena asks her about Geneva, but she has already disappeared.

Selena is in an ambulance, and there are several other ambulances and four police cars at her house. A crowd of spectators is beginning to gather. Selena tells Detective Crowe everything she knows about Pearl, beginning with when she started following her family years ago.

Detective Crowe tells her that a man named Hunter Ross visited him. He has been investigating Stella Behr’s murder and Pearl’s disappearance for years, but he came to see Crowe about Geneva. He explains that when Geneva’s face appeared on TV, Ross realized that she was Gracie Stevenson, another girl who disappeared years ago after her mother’s murder. Crowe tells her that Pearl is the woman who said she was Geneva’s sister and reported her missing.

Selena doesn’t quite know how Pearl and Geneva could have been working together to con the Murphys; she met Geneva on the playground in a way that felt coincidental. Crowe tells Selena that they were probably planning to blackmail Graham in the same way Geneva conned Erik Tucker, but they underestimated how violent Graham was, and he killed her. He says that he has video footage of Graham hauling something large into a dumpster the night Geneva disappeared, which leads him to believe that Graham killed her and that he would have killed Selena had Pearl not intervened. Crowe asks Selena if there is anything else she needs to tell him about Graham, Pearl, or Geneva. Thinking about how complicated and multi-dimensional people are, she tells him that he knows as much as she does.

Geneva is revealed to be alive. It turns out that Pearl locked her in the cellar below the house they shared with Pop when it became clear that Graham was dangerous and unpredictable.

Geneva asks if Selena and the boys are okay, and Pearl tells her that they will be. They both feel they are ready to stop conning and start normal lives. Pearl gives Geneva half of the money she has accumulated from her cons, as well as a clean license, passport, and Social Security card—everything she needs to start a new life. Her new name will be Alice Grace Miller. Pearl tells Geneva that if she ever gets into trouble, she can always come back to the cellar.

Pearl and Geneva get in Pearl’s car to start their new lives, and Geneva sees smoke behind them in the rearview mirror. She realizes that Pearl set fire to the house and will burn it to the ground.

Pearl is at the airport. Her new name is Emily Pearl Miller. She uses her last burner phone to call Hunter Ross. She tells him that she is Pearl Behr and thanks him for continuing to look for her for so long. She wants to know if he ever found out who Charlie Finch really was. He tells her that he did not and asks Pearl about his death.

She asks Ross whether he believes Charlie killed her mother. He doesn’t know for sure but points out there was a pattern between Charlie’s relationship with Stella and Pearl and, later, his relationship with Maggie and Grace Markson. Though he may have killed Pearl’s and Grace’s mothers, it is also true that he loved and took care of them.

Pearl tells Ross that she is planning to disappear now that she is done with conning. She tells him where her father and Bridget are buried so he can continue trying to figure out who Charlie really was. She says goodbye, gets rid of the phone, and gets ready to board the plane. She is planning to meet Ben, the man she had been conning but was beginning to actually like. They will travel for a while and then figure out where to settle down.

Selena is in her attic office, writing about her experiences. She is describing an encounter from years ago between Pearl and Cora when Cora eventually asked Pearl what she wanted. Pearl apologized for hurting her but told her that she did her a favor by exposing her husband’s bad behavior. Cora can see that Pearl had been hurt as well. Cora told Selena that Pearl was right; after Pearl ruined her life, Cora was able to make a new, better one.

Selena remembers Graham’s trial and how he cried on the stand. He said he didn’t remember killing Jacqueline Carson or trying to kill Selena, but there was video and photo evidence that he had killed Jacqueline. Pearl saw Graham go into her house and later throw something into a dumpster, which turned out to be bloody clothes. Pearl knew Graham’s true nature before anyone else did.

Selena’s friend Beth encouraged her to write this book. As a literary agent, she always wanted to be a writer. She began researching Pearl and Grace with Hunter Ross’s help and wrote about how the family of con artists intersected with her own family.

Graham was convicted of Jacqueline’s murder, and the months that followed were very difficult for Selena and her sons. They are all going to therapy, and in many ways, Selena’s writing is a therapeutic technique to help her process everything that happened.

Now, their lives have settled into a more comfortable rhythm. Selena found a new house near Cora and Paulo, and Stephen and Oliver talk to Graham every Sunday. Will is a large part of their lives now; he often comes over to their house and plays with Stephen and Oliver. They are friends, but Selena knows that he is waiting patiently, hoping that someday they will have a romantic relationship again.

Occasionally, Selena worries that the darkness in her father and Graham are lurking somewhere within Stephen and Oliver. She watches their behavior closely but ultimately feels that Paulo and Will are setting good examples of what it means to be good, loving men.

Occasionally, whenever something pops up in the news about Graham’s case, she gets a text from Pearl just letting her know that she is thinking of her. Selena never responds but is glad to know that Pearl is okay. At the end of each text, Pearl always says the same thing: “It’s Martha, by the way. From the train” (364).