48 pages • 1 hour read
Julie ClarkThe Last Flight
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 30-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 30 Summary: “Claire”
Hours pass as Claire waits for some response from CNN. Every passing minute, she fears, Rory is getting closer. Her email pings: CNN is “definitely interested” in the story. At the same time, Claire’s phone rings. It is Kate Lane, a news anchor at CNN. Lane asks how they might authenticate the recording before they go on air with the bombshell story and then promises her team will find Charlotte Price. In the meantime, she asks Claire to come to CNN’s San Francisco studio to begin preliminary taping. Just as Claire is leaving, there is a knock at the door. It is FBI Agent Castro, who wants to ask Claire some questions about Eva James.
Chapter 31 Summary: “Eva”
The day before the crash, Eva lands in Newark and calls Liz, who invites her to come to her house. Eva admits everything to Liz: her expulsion from Berkeley, her drug dealing, and now her desperate flight from a violent crime boss. The more Eva tells Liz, the more sympathetic Liz becomes. She tells Eva the only to get her life back is to cooperate with the feds: “You have to stop running” (239). Eva says she needs to disappear—secure a fake passport in New York and vanish. Liz warns her she will live the rest of her life in fear and urges her to fly back to California, make a deal with the feds, and send Fish to prison.
Eva knows Liz is right and is grateful for the sense of belonging Liz has provided her with. To do what Liz recommends will take more courage than Eva thinks she has, but Liz reassures her, “[Y]ou are a brilliant flash of kindness […] I will be out here, loving you” (241). The door opens and Liz’s daughter, Ellie, walks in; she tells Eva she goes by her full name, Danielle.
Chapter 32 Summary: “Claire”
At first Claire denies knowing Eva James, but Agent Castro reminds her that Claire is staying at Eva’s apartment and wearing Eva’s clothes. The FBI put a tap on Eva’s phone months earlier and have monitored all of Claire’s phone calls. Castro wants to know about switching identities at the airport. Claire tells him about Eva’s story of helping her dying husband and then about the man who came to the door, presumably Fish. When the car from the television studio arrives, Castro advises her to get on the air as soon as she can: “[Y]our husband can’t touch you if the whole world knows you’re alive” (245). Claire heads to the car with the help of the driver, a friendly man with a big tattoo on his arm. As the car heads to the studio, Claire gets a text from Danielle warning her that Rory sent a man to get her—a big man with a tattoo on his arm.
Chapter 33 Summary: “Eva”
Danielle is curious about Eva’s sudden appearance and asks her why she came to Newark. “A quick visit to see some friends” (248), Eva lies, saying she is heading back to California tomorrow. Danielle is uneasy about having an unexpected houseguest. As she explains to her mother, things are hectic at the Foundation owing to a last-minute change of plans: Cook’s wife, Claire, was supposed to go to Detroit, but in the morning she will find out she is now going to Puerto Rico. Danielle needs to pack to go to Detroit with her boss. Danielle tells Liz she thinks Claire is finally getting ready to leave her husband: “If she’s smart, she’ll go to Puerto Rico and never come back” (249).
Eva overhears enough of the conversation to think Claire might be her salvation. She Googles the name and reads up on Claire, wondering how she will react to being rerouted at the last minute to Puerto Rico: “If Claire was planning to run, she’d find herself desperate for a solution. Another way out” (250). After saying good night to Liz and her daughter, Eva heads to the spare bedroom and quietly changes her plane reservation from Newark to JFK.
Chapter 34 Summary: “Claire”
Claire is uncertain what to do in the car being driven, she believes, by one of her husband’s henchmen. As they move through traffic, Claire feels increasingly helpless. Just as she is about to jump from the moving car, the driver assures her they will be at the CNN studios in a few minutes. This, she reasons, is the “price of abuse” (252)—always living in fear and paranoia—because Rory could not have found her so easily.
A producer greets Claire and preps her for the interview with Kate Lane through a feed from Washington. Lane assures her that CNN has already contacted Charlotte Price, and she cautions Claire about the repercussions about coming forward to challenge such a powerful public figure: “People will dig into your life” (253).
The live interview begins, and Claire calmly tells her story. Like many women, she says, she was trapped in an abusive marriage, afraid to leave and afraid to stand up for herself. She relates how the opportunity to switch identities with the woman at the airport was finally her chance. She was sorry the woman lost her life. She tells the harrowing story of the beatings she endured, the bruises she struggled to conceal, and the loneliness of her long marriage: “I am ready to step beyond fear. I want my life back. Mine” (257).
Chapter 35 Summary: “Claire”
A month after the crash, Claire visits the now-empty offices of her husband to retrieve her few personal effects. Her husband is under investigation by a grand jury. The hero turns out to be Charlie Price, who was too afraid for years to come forward with what she knew about her lover: “Like many, she had grown tired of watching powerful men never being held accountable” (259). Claire takes little from the office, eager to start her new life in Berkeley with the help of Kelly. When Claire briefly flew back to California, Kelly showed her an apartment—not as spacious as what she is used to but perfect. There are still lingering questions about Eva and whether she was on the flight, but Claire suspects she may never know for sure.
As Claire is packing to head to California for good, she has a visitor: Danielle. Danielle tells Claire that Eva was a friend of her mother’s. When she first met Eva, Danielle tells Claire, there was something furtive about the woman; when she caught Eva Googling Claire, she decided to send the text message to Claire, hoping to make up for staying silent about Claire’s abuse. Claire thanks her for risking so much to record that crucial conversation between Rory and Bruce Corcoran. Claire is ready to head to California.
Epilogue Summary
Eva is preparing to board the flight to Puerto Rico. She considers trying to jump the line and head back into the airport, but she resists. She thinks about Claire and her desperate struggle to leave her husband: “Each of us is desperate enough to take a risk. To turn our backs on what the world demands we be. It isn’t just what has been done to them […] it’s a system that tells women we are unreliable, and then expendable” (268). She boards the plane certain that she now forgives herself. She plans to ask the stewards whether, because the flight is not full, she might move from her aisle seat to a window: “I want to view the world—its wide vista expanding in a graceful arc below me” (268). As she makes her way toward the open hatchway, she feels the elation of shedding her “old self.” She steps into the doomed plane and resolves to never look back.
Chapter 30-Epilogue Analysis
The novel ends where it began: two women, desperate to break free of the control of toxic men, both in flight. Claire triumphs in her last flight to the CNN studios, while Eva heads toward her doom.
The drive to the CNN studios reveals The Effect of Domestic Abuse. The text from Danielle describing the man Claire’s husband has sent to kill her immediately sets off a panic attack. She goes from feeling secure to helpless, vulnerable, and doomed. That she is so quick to assume her peril reflects her trauma. Her desperation is clear in her decision to try to leap from the moving car while it passes through a tunnel: “I have one hand resting on the latch of my seat belt and my other hand lowering to the door handle, ready to yank it open and leap out into the darkness” (252). Only the revelation that the driver in fact works for CNN stops Claire from what surely would have been a fatal leap.
The scenes set in the CNN studios reflect the novel’s suggestion that women must step forward and give voice to the pain of domestic abuse. The more Claire talks in the studio interview, the more emphatic and confident she becomes. “I’m ready to step beyond fear” (257), she tells the CNN anchor, echoing the maxim Liz gifted to Eva months before. She identifies exactly what both her husband has taken from her and what Fish has taken from Eva: “self-worth.” That her interview leads to the downfall of her supposedly invulnerable husband gives the novel its optimistic ending. The revelations from Charlie Price, another silent victim of Rory, ensure Rory will now be held accountable for his criminal actions. Claire, however, does not gloat or rejoice in her husband’s fall from power. In her last moments gathering her few things from the now-closed Cook Foundation offices, she looks ahead; she is too much her recovered self to waste energy on regrets, recriminations, or hate. Echoing Liz’s advice to Eva, Claire walks out of the offices “with her eyes forward” (266).
The novel, however, refuses to allow an unrealistically tidy sense of women victorious over male subjugation. Claire is fortunate in that events conspire to help her come forward: Danielle reaches out to her with evidence of Rory’s crimes, and the publicity surrounding the plane crash gives Claire some protection (Rory wouldn’t dare kill her with the entire country watching). By contrast, Eva moves away and apart, struggling to handle her dilemma on her own. After initially planning to strike a deal with the feds as Liz advised, Eva chooses at the last minute to run, engineering the ticket-swapping maneuver with Claire. Her sense of freedom as she boards the doomed plane to Puerto Rico is tragic and ironic, but her fate is realistic. In ending the novel with Eva’s imminent death rather than with Claire’s victory, the novel cautions that the bane of men abusing and using women is far from over: The #MeToo movement has only revealed the enormous work our culture still has to do. Celebrate the Claires, the novel suggests, but do not forget the Evas.
