The Last House Guest

“I’ve known enough of loss to accept that grief may lose its sharpness with time, but memory only tightens. Moments replay.”

Avery’s grief is intermixed with feelings of guilt. She feels that if she had paid closer attention, she might have seen warning signs leading up to Sadie’s death. Even a year later, she still replays their interactions in her mind.

“This is my favorite place in the world. Nothing bad is allowed to happen here. I forbid it.”

Sadie’s comment when she first meets Avery offers a sad foreshadowing of her death, as something very bad happens in this favorite place, and it happens to her. As the novel progresses, this quote also illuminates the reason for her murder. Detective Collins killed Sadie because of her determination to reveal the truth about the accident that killed Avery’s parents; Collins and Parker did something bad in her favorite place in the world, and she could not let them get away with it.

“In truth, the place was wild and brutal and swung to extremes.”

Avery’s statement about the weather around Littleport also applies to the townspeople. Littleport is divided between the downtown area, made up of working-class permanent residents, and the overlook, where upper-class renters stay in the summer. There is no middle ground in the public perception where these groups can coexist peacefully; rather, they will always be in conflict because of their polarized opinions of each other.

“It was an act, and we were all playing.”

As someone with a foot in two worlds, Avery sees the façade put on by both sides. The renters act enamored with Littleport while distrusting its residents; the locals decorate and smile for the renters, never giving away the town’s history of dark secrets or their own displeasure that their home is overrun with strangers every summer.

“I always did this, went three steps too far, trying to map things forward and back, so I could see something coming this time. A habit from a time when I could trust only myself and the things I knew to be true.”

Avery shames herself for her vigilance, but without her constant search for hidden truths, she never would have uncovered Sadie’s true killer or the real circumstances of her parents’ accident. That said, Avery’s search for the truth can sometimes be single-minded, as she excludes potential threads she cannot bear to follow due to the threat they pose to her current status quo.

“Their world was old money that said you didn’t have to show it to prove it. The clothes didn’t matter; it was the details, the way you carried it, and I could never get it just right.”

Avery identifies what sets her apart from Sadie and her circle: not money but the privilege and attitude that comes with it. She can wear Sadie’s hand-me-downs or buy her own clothes, but either way, she still will not have the mentality Sadie grew up with. There is a difference between their lived experiences that Avery could never mimic and Sadie could never teach.

“It was the silence that made me turn around and see her. A presence I could feel rather than hear.”

Avery seems highly attuned to the sights and sounds of the environment around her, including the silences. For Avery, silence becomes just as loud and noticeable as any garish noise. When it becomes too quiet, she becomes more vigilant, looking and listening for something out of place within the absences that others pay no mind.

“She said there was something about this place that had stopped her. That she was drawn in by something she couldn’t let go, something she was chasing. Something I later saw in draft after draft in her studio, hidden away in stacks. I could see it in her face as she was working, shifting her angle, her perspective, and looking again. Like there was some intangible element she couldn’t quite grasp. The beauty of her finished pieces was that you could see not only the image but her intention. This feeling that something was missing, and it pulled you closer, thinking you might be the one to uncover it. But that was the trick of the place—it lured you in under false pretenses, and then it took everything from you.”

Avery’s mother claims that what drew her to Littleport was an unknown secret within the town itself, one she tried to capture again and again in her paintings. In reality, she stayed because she met Avery’s father and fell in love; the truth was simpler than the mystery, but it planted in Avery’s head the idea that there is always a hidden depth beneath the immediately visible exterior. Avery recognizes that while the truth can be appealing, the quest for it can be an immense risk that does not always pay off.

“Looking back, I realized that this was the thing I was most taken with—the idea that you didn’t have to apologize. Not for what you’d done and not for who you were. Of all the promises that had been opened up to me that first summer, this was the most intoxicating of all.”

Avery finds a certain healing quality in her friendship with Sadie and the world that their bond opens up to her. She spent considerable time feeling sorry for what she did in the past, the people she hurt when she was grieving her family, and for the reputation she brought upon herself. Sadie introduced her to the possibility that you can embrace the past as part of yourself and use that self-acceptance to move forward.

“I’d heard the rumors. That I was Grant’s mistress. Or Bianca’s. That I was in service to something dark and secret, something they tried to cover up by planting me right out in the open. As if the idea of generosity of friendship, of a family that extended beyond the circumstances of your birth, was something too hard to fathom.”

Littleport’s residents have a cynical view of Avery’s involvement with the Lomans. In their eyes, there is no way a rich family would welcome in a poor local girl for anything other than personal gain. This public perception continually upsets Avery, as she insists the Lomans are not as bad as the locals think. Ironically, Avery does not apply her truth-seeking to the Lomans because their generosity puts them in her blind spot, and she either cannot see or does not want to look for any hints that may incriminate them.

“The biggest danger of all in Littleport was assuming that you were invisible. That no one else saw you.”

Avery highlights a significant quality of small towns: the feeling of being surveilled. It is not so much that people are actively watching through traditional surveillance methods—or even surreptitious ones. Rather, there is little else to do in such a small, quiet town besides gossip about who and what you see. Everyone knows everyone, and everyone wants to know everyone’s business. What might be an innocent visit to a friend’s house can quickly spin out of control into a rumor of a secret affair.

“For a long time, I was forgiven my transgressions—it was grief, and wasn’t I a tragic cliché, stuck in a loop of anger and bitterness? But people must’ve realized what I too soon understood: that grief did not create anything that had not existed before. It only heightened what was already there. Removing the binds that once shielded me. Here, then, was the true Avery Greer.”

Avery’s conception of grief is an emotional state that amplifies preexisting qualities within her—in a way, grief unhinges her. In her youth, when her parents and grandmother died, she spiraled toward rock bottom, but in the present, her grief over Sadie’s death amplifies other qualities, especially her sense of justice.

“Parker called it obsession, but it wasn’t. I saw obsession in the stacks of paintings in my mother’s studio; in the boats setting out on the ocean before dawn, day after day. Obsession was the gravity that kept you in orbit, a force you were continually spiraling toward, even when you were looking away.”

Parker is convinced Sadie’s death was a suicide because he thought she was obsessed with death, but Avery disagrees with him about the nature of an obsession itself. Avery’s own experience with obsession (and contemplation of death) allows her to better understand Sadie’s mental state. She feels Sadie was not headed toward death willingly because Avery knows how that feels and what that path looks like. Parker has a limited understanding of obsession and its nuances because he is protected by his parents at every turn; he has not had to fight to pursue something he desires.

“I thought of that often at night, how we were all sleeping when it happened. How you can hurtle through darkness by momentum alone, without a single conscious thought, with no one to see you go.”

The police attributed the car accident to Avery’s father falling asleep at the wheel. When Avery’s parents died, she was asleep at home. When Sadie died, the town was in a different state of sleep, a blissful ignorance, caught up in revelry at the Plus-One Party. In the novel, sleep becomes more than rest—it is a false sense of security, a state of mind in which one is unconsciously unaware of the dangers around them.

“What was the chance that all of this was a mistake? That the police, and her family, had seen one thing and believed another? What were the odds that Sadie had chosen those very same words, the ones I had used earlier that summer—the ones I had written myself, folded in half, and left on the surface of her desk for her?”

Sadie’s suicide note is the first clear indication that nothing is what it seems in the investigation. That Avery is the one who determines the note’s true origin is significant, not only because it is her apology note to Sadie repurposed as a suicide note—which effectively quelled any potential murder investigation—but also because her constant vigilance finally did reveal a hidden truth. Everyone else saw one thing and believed it to be another, but Avery sees what fills the gap between perception and reality.

“I’d assumed her family had taken her personal items, along with her clothes, back to Connecticut. But the back of my neck prickled. There was just enough of Sadie left behind for me to feel her still. To look over my shoulder and imagine her finding me here. Sneaking up on me, light on her feet, hands over my eyes—think fast. My heart in my stomach even as she was already laughing.”

Sadie’s belongings are strong reminders of her life, and the way her room is still set up with her personal effects creates the impression that she might walk in the door at any moment, ready to resume living. Once again, Avery feels Sadie in the silence, only this time, Sadie is not there for her to find.

“It was a small thrill to realize that they knew who I was, that I was the one to turn to. That I was the person in charge here.”

Although Avery does, at times, resent her dual-status and the social complications it brings, when the Plus-One Party is in jeopardy, people from both sides turn to her for guidance and instruction. She enjoys the power that comes with her position, from being known by locals and renters alike, even if she does not know them. She is simultaneously elevated above the locals (she has control with the renters that they do not) and the renters (she has power over them, helping when they cannot help themselves).

“Connor standing before me could go one of two ways. There could be the slide to nostalgia, where he turned his head to the side and I caught a glimpse of the old him, the old us; or there could be the slide to irritation—this feeling that he had secrets I could no longer understand, an exterior I could not decipher. An entire second life he was living in the gap.”

Avery acknowledges the presence of surface and depth within Connor and recognizes that since they broke up, he has become a different person. On the surface, he is still Connor, but underneath that exterior, he has thoughts and feelings she cannot know or predict, and that unknown space frustrates her.

“I believe that a person can become possessed by someone else—at least in part. That one life can slip inside another, giving it shape.”

Avery identifies a significant aspect of her close bond with Sadie: the way they each emulate attributes or behaviors they admire in the other. Avery calls it “possession,” indicating a more full-body experience than a single trait. Avery reimagines events from Sadie’s and Luce’s perspectives, considering what it would be like to walk in their footsteps. This ability to adopt another’s perspective and explore their point of view indicates a strong sense of empathy.

“He once told me I had something his own children lacked. The secret to success that eluded even Parker, he said, was that you had to take great risks for great rewards. That to change your life, to truly change it, you had to be willing to lose.”

Grant Loman once rewarded Avery’s courage for uncovering a trail of missing funds. The risk she took could have jeopardized her place in the family; she could have easily been blamed for the theft and shunned, but Avery risked it because she was confident she was doing the right thing. This willingness to put oneself on the line is something Parker is never capable of because Grant and Bianca made sure he never had to do.

“How long had I been standing perfectly still, watching the lives of others play out around me? Leaning against a wall, drinking what was left of the Lomans’ whiskey? The Lomans’ house, the Lomans’ rules, the Lomans’ world. Like sitting in Connor’s boat, watching from the outside in. No matter how close I got, I was always the one watching.”

Avery recognizes her true place in the Loman family: a perpetual outsider. She exists on the periphery, participating but not belonging. In truth, she could never truly belong in either world because she had no life of her own. Parker’s role in her parents’ death and the subsequent coverup ripped apart her sense of self, and when the Lomans took her in, Avery became further lost in the roles they had her play.

“No one could be sure, really, who was there and who had gone. A party like that, you could only say the thing you hoped others would say for you. A deep-buried instinct to protect your own.”

After the Plus-One Party, Avery covers for her friends because she believes they would cover for her. Ironically, she calls it an “instinct to protect [her] own,” even though neither group sees her as being one of them. It indicates a loyalty she hopes is reciprocated by those she counts as friends and family. While Avery previously said her grief revealed who she truly was, it seems more apparent now that her true self is revealed in moments of uncertainty; she might have destructive tendencies, but her first instinct is a protective one.

“With my new understanding of my past, Littleport in the dead of night became something else. No longer were these the winding roads of single-car accidents, or a lack of streetlights, of drifting off the road while you slept. But a town where the guilty roamed, unapologetic. It was a place that made killers of men.”

Now that Avery has uncovered the hidden truths, her worldview has drastically changed. The dangers she once perceived as environmental are revealed to be manmade, and she realizes that being unapologetic for your past can be taken too far, especially when other people’s lives are involved. Her new understanding also reveals the difference between tragedy and catastrophe: A catastrophe is a natural incident, while a tragedy requires a human element—like a speeding car, a locked trunk, a coverup, and a payoff.