The Only One Left

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Interlude 1-Chapter 6

Chapters 7-14

Interludes 5-8

Chapters 23-30

Interlude 11-Chapter 37

Interludes 14-19

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Book Club Questions

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Discussion Questions

Character Analysis

Kittridge “Kit” McDeere

Kit McDeere is the first-person narrator of the novel’s present-day events, which take place in 1983. Thirty-one-year-old Kit has spent her entire life in the coastal Maine town where she grew up, working for the past 12 as a home health care provider for a local agency. When not residing with her patients, Kit lives at home with her parents Patrick and Kathleen. Kit enjoys her work, but its time commitment has made her relatively isolated; she does not have any close friends, pursue any hobbies, or travel outside her hometown. Her only social connection is to her neighbor Kenny, 11 years her junior, with whom she shares a mutually convenient casual sexual relationship.

The death of Kit’s mother six months before the beginning of the novel is the defining event of Kit’s life. Working as her mother’s caregiver, Kit was on duty when Kathleen died as the result of an opiate overdose. Although a criminal investigation and an inquest by the state health board found her innocent, Kit was suspended from her job for six months without pay. Though Kit is adamant that she did not give the pills to her mother with the intent of participating in assisted suicide, she does admit accidentally leaving the pills in her mother’s room. A local detective refuses to believe her story; though never charged with a crime, Kit is declared culpable by the press and treated with hostility and suspicion in town. Kit is forced to reluctantly take a job at Hope’s End, caring for Lenora Hope—an elderly woman who became infamous as a teenager when she was accused of killing her parents and sister in 1929.

Kit is inquisitive, cautious, committed to her vocation, and relentless in her pursuit of truth and justice. She develops a tentatively warm relationship with her patient, whom she wants to help and advocate for, but who often frustrates Kit with secret-keeping, obfuscation, and stubbornness. Concerned that Hope’s End housekeeper Mrs. Baker doesn’t have the patient’s best interests at heart, Kit is willing to disobey Mrs. Baker’s rules to find out the truth behind the Hope murders. Kit’s guilt over leaving the pills in her mother’s room with the knowledge that her mother might decide to end her life, compounded by her empathy-driven desire to vindicate her patient, compels Kit to act with courage and initiative and ultimately leads her to the unmask the real culprits behind both Virginia Hope’s past traumas and Kit’s own.

“Lenora Hope” (Virginia Hope)

By the fall of 1983, the novel’s present timeframe, Virginia Hope has lived for 54 years as her elder sister, Lenora, at the Hope’s End estate. All this time, she has been at the mercy of the real Lenora, who manages the household under the false identity of Mrs. Baker. “Lenora” is a pariah in the town, long suspected of having killed her parents and sister and becoming a kind of true-crime thrill for new generations of town residents.

As a lonely, sensitive young teenager looking for love and companionship, Virginia longed for the opportunity to explore the world outside the repressive and abusive Hope’s End. In 1929, she fell in love with Ricky, a local young man hired to work at her family’s estate for the summer. Amidst promises that they would run away together, Virginia got pregnant, concealing her condition from her of her cruel, domineering father Winston and vicious, opportunistic sister. On the night Virginia and Ricky planned to run away, her sister Lenora discovered a visibly pregnant Virginia packing her belongings, and alerted their father. Virginia, sent into labor by her distress, gave birth to a baby boy who was immediately taken away from her; on the same night, she realized that Ricky was happy to abandon her in exchange for a payout from her father. Also that same night, Winston’s wife Evangeline murdered her husband, Ricky killed Evangeline, and Virginia tried to die by suicide. When Virginia survived with debilitating disabilities, her sister Lenora saw an opportunity to escape. She had Virginia declared dead, assigned Virginia the name Lenora, and disguised herself as “Mrs. Baker”—a former governess.

As Virginia survives her de factor imprisonment in Hope’s End, she has several methods of resistance. First, she is in fact verbal and mobile, contrary to what “Mrs. Baker” believes—Virginia did not actually suffer the hypoxic brain injury their family doctor had diagnosed. Second, Virginia begins typing out her version of the events of that fateful night with the help of her first caregiver, Mary. When Mary disappears and Kit arrives at Hope’s End to take her place, Virginia is at first reluctant to take Kit into her confidence, but Kit’s investigation allows Virginia to finally reclaim her voice, identity, and agency. Once the real Lenora dies in the collapse of their family home, Virginia gets the life she always wanted, traveling the world with those she loves. In her memoir Still Life, Virginia explains her story for the public, now famous on her own terms.

“Mrs. Baker” (Lenora Hope)

In 1929, Lenora Hope was a bitter, angry, and vindictive teenager. As her mother’s illegitimate child, Lenora has lived with the knowledge that Winston Hope, her adopted father, considers her a “bastard”—the new money Winston was only allowed to marry the socially elite Evangeline because she pregnant, so that Lenora might be born under the guise of legitimacy. Nevertheless, Lenora grows up desperate for Winston’s approval, internalizing his opportunism, greed, and obsession with social status. Lenora and Winston Hope are very much alike: entitled, selfish, malicious, and vindictive. Lenora often tries to impress and please their father at the expense of her younger sister Virginia, with whom Lenora regularly competes.

When Lenora learns that her sister is in a romantic relationship, Lenora becomes determined to exploit this fact and ruin Virginia’s life—young women of their class were expected to remain sexually pure until marriage. After the horrific murders of Winston and Evangeline, and in the wake of Virginia’s failed attempt to die by suicide, Lenora seizes the opportunity to imprison her sister as “Lenora,” blame her for the killings, and escape into a new life as Miss Baker. Lenora thus gains full control of the Hope inheritance, while Virginia’s ostensible disabilities allow Lenora to torment her younger sister by running the household strictly and oppressively, insisting that Virginia not be allowed outside of her room, and carefully curating those who have access to her.

It is a badly kept secret that “Mrs. Baker” drinks heavily; the other household employees are wary and frightened of her. Over the years, Lenora has struggled to maintain the structural integrity of the house, but much of her trust fund has gone to pay off blackmailer Berniece Mayhew. The resulting disrepair and dilapidation are symbolic of the rot at the heart of the Hope family. When Hope’s End finally crumbles into the ocean along with the cliff supporting it, Lenora decides to end her own life inside it.