47 pages • 1 hour read
Mary KubicaShe's Not Sorry
Fiction | Memoir in Verse | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 8-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary
Meghan picks up a call from her doctor about her recent mammogram while standing outside the restaurant where she’s meeting Nat. The doctor is worried about the results and wants Meghan to have another exam. Inside the restaurant, Meghan joins Nat, who seems frazzled. They talk about their work, and Nat commends Meghan’s difficult job. She then expresses her condolences about Bethany. When Meghan sees Nat’s bruise again, Nat explains that she’s clumsy and walked into a door in the middle of the night. They continue chatting about high school and their former classmates. Eventually, the conversation turns to Nat’s relationship, and Meghan asks about Nat’s ex-husband, Declan Roche. Nat admits that he has been cheating on her with a younger woman and is also abusive. However, because he’s a lawyer at Tanner & Levine, Nat feels incapable of reporting him. Suddenly, Nat’s behavior changes, and she insists that she has to leave to go help her sick friend.
On Meghan’s walk home afterward, she can’t stop thinking about what Nat told her. She remembers a former patient named Anne who had an abusive marriage. Meghan tried to help her, but Anne wouldn’t leave her husband, and he ultimately beat her to death. She’s worried about Nat and then starts to panic when she remembers that Sienna is at home alone. She feels even more upset when she gets home and sees Sienna standing in the apartment doorway talking to an unfamiliar man. Meghan forces herself between them and demands that he leave even after she learns that he’s the new downstairs neighbor, Evan. Inside, Meghan reminds Sienna to be careful and not to open the door to people she doesn’t know.
Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary
Meghan hears reports of another attack in the neighborhood. She then goes to work, panicking when she sees policemen talking to Caitlin’s parents in her room. Luke explains that the police no longer think that Caitlin jumped and are now convinced that someone pushed her off the bridge. After the police leave, Meghan joins the Becketts in Caitlin’s room, and they introduce her to their son, Jackson, who has just arrived from London. The family also updates Meghan on the police’s conjectures. Meghan feels anxious hearing them discuss attempted murder and notices Jackson’s odd, unemotional demeanor. She then tells the family about the strange man who’s been visiting Caitlin.
In the break room, Meghan finds a note reading “BITCH” in her locker. Luke notices that she seems upset, but Meghan doesn’t reveal the contents of the note. She and Luke chat about the string of robberies and attacks, and Luke admits that he worries constantly about Meghan and Sienna. Meghan opens up to him about her own troubles before he returns to work.
Part 1, Chapter 10 Summary
At home, Meghan messages Nat to check up on her, as she’s still thinking about Nat’s abusive relationship. Nat doesn’t respond. Later, Ben stops by to pick up Sienna. Meghan feels irritated, and they get into an argument about Sienna’s whereabouts and Meghan’s new clothes. Meghan wants Ben to think that she’s doing well but doesn’t want him to think that she’s using his child support money for herself.
After Ben and Sienna leave, Meghan receives a message from Nat saying she lied about her sick friend. She really left the restaurant because Declan was standing outside watching her. Worried, Meghan demands to know where Nat is. After Nat sends her location, Meghan goes out and finds Nat outside a shoe store. They stand on the street talking. Nat tells Meghan more about her relationship, revealing that she and Declan aren’t divorced. She explains their history and Declan’s increasingly aggressive behavior. Nat has been staying with a friend, but all her friends disbelieve her story and support Declan. Meghan realizes that Declan has been tracking Nat’s phone and urges Nat to seek a restraining order. Nat resists and decides to go back to her friend’s house.
Meghan gets Nat a cab and then walks home. On the way, Meghan hears footsteps approaching behind her. She panics and clenches her keys. Finally, she reels around demanding to know what the man wants. She’s shocked to see that it’s Luke. He apologizes for frightening her. They get into a conversation about Luke’s marriage and future. He wants to get a house for him, Penelope, and the new baby, but he’s struggling financially, and Penelope is mad at him. He’s been walking around trying to calm down after another fight with her. Meghan comforts him and encourages him to see things from Penelope’s point of view. Luke walks Meghan home, and they say goodbye.
Part 1, Chapter 11 Summary
Meghan visits the pedestrian bridge where Caitlin jumped. Just seeing the bridge in the distance makes her emotional. She parks and walks onto the bridge, thinking about what happened to Caitlin. Then Jackson appears, demanding to know why Meghan is there. They talk about Caitlin, and Jackson reveals how unsympathetic he is to her situation. Finally, Meghan leaves. She realizes that Jackson mentioned having been in Chicago for several days and wonders why he lied about coming from London.
Part 1, Chapter 12 Summary
Meghan is lost in thought on her walk home from work. Suddenly, she hears a man yelling at a woman up ahead. She’s shocked to see that the woman is Nat. Nat reveals that her friend doesn’t want her to stay with her anymore and that she has no place to go and no money. Meghan insists that Nat come back to her place, as Sienna is at Ben’s for the weekend. Remembering her former patient again, Meghan tries to comfort and encourage Nat. At the apartment, she assures Nat that everything she’s feeling is allowed. She then tells Nat about her relationship with Ben to distract her. Nat shows Meghan Declan’s angry text messages. Meghan takes her phone and assures Nat that she’s safe with her. Lying in bed afterward, however, Meghan wonders if either of them is safe.
Part 1, Chapter 13 Summary
Meghan has trouble focusing at work. Then the police return and ask Meghan about the strange man who’s been visiting Caitlin. They’ve been investigating Caitlin’s history and worry that someone from her past was stalking her and tried to kill her. They show Meghan a lineup of photographs and ask her to identify the man. Meghan feels guilty but chooses the man out of the lineup. His name is Milo Finch, and he’s a formerly incarcerated man who broke his parole to follow Caitlin across the country. Afterward, Tom confronts Meghan again about Caitlin’s voicemail. He still doesn’t want anyone to know about it. Meghan assures him she’ll keep his secret. As the day passes, she keeps thinking about Milo Finch, telling herself she doesn’t have to feel guilty for identifying him because he isn’t a good man anyway.
Part 1, Chapters 8-13 Analysis
The narrative tension intensifies throughout Chapters 8 through 13 as Meghan becomes increasingly invested in the lives of Nat and Caitlin. Because Meghan sees herself as a fundamentally caring, empathetic, and sacrificial person, she begins to devote her time and attention to these two women. In particular, Meghan becomes desperate to help and support Nat. She assumes a caretaking, protective role in Nat’s life that is in large part driven by Meghan’s personal and professional past, as evidenced by her response to Nat confiding the details of her abusive marriage to Declan. Meghan’s mind shifts into sequences from her former life, and she thinks “back to about four or five years ago, when [she] took care of a woman in the ICU who had suffered a brain hemorrhage as a result of domestic abuse” (97). Meghan’s complex involvement with this patient, Anne, informs the way that she behaves with Nat. In the wake of Anne’s murder, Meghan wondered if she “could have or should have done more” to protect her patient (98). Therefore, she begins to see Nat as another version of Anne—a woman who is in need and for whom she feels responsible—developing the themes of Stalled Recovery From Trauma and The Impact of Past Actions on Present Circumstances.
Atonement is not the only thing Meghan seeks in her relationship with Nat. Meghan is already living with the constant fear that she and her daughter aren’t safe on the streets or at home alone. However, the more involved in Nat’s life she becomes, the more she stops “think[ing] about [her] own safety” and begins “tak[ing] for granted that [Nat] is the one in danger and that [Meghan is] safe” (127). This evolving dynamic reveals Meghan’s desperation to prove that she is a good and capable person. She feels better able to devote herself to Nat’s affairs and well-being than to her own or to her family’s, which calls her narrative, her motives, and her character into question and augments the narrative mystery.
Meanwhile, new developments in Caitlin Beckett’s case intensify Meghan’s internal experience. Ever since Meghan was assigned to Caitlin’s care, she has had trouble balancing her personal feelings with her professional responsibilities. She has also become more and more involved with Caitlin’s parents and their emotions, needs, and desires. The sudden police involvement in Caitlin’s case further complicates Meghan’s work situation and her ability to focus on caring for Caitlin as a patient. Once the police and the Becketts start talking about Caitlin’s alleged suicide attempt as “an attempted homicide” (109), Meghan’s mode of relating to the family begins to change. Because Meghan has made repeated allusions to her fraught familial past and her sister’s death by suicide, her emotional reaction to the situation implies that Meghan’s trauma is continuing to affect her present life. At the same time, Meghan’s decision to visit the pedestrian bridge on Lake Shore Drive casts doubt on this interpretation. Meghan “feel[s] a surge of emotions wash over [her] seeing the bridge” and “regret[s] coming all of a sudden” (137). These emotional details imply that Meghan has other, unrevealed reasons for visiting the bridge and obsessing over Caitlin’s fall, developing the theme of Secrets and Their Destructive Consequences.
Furthermore, Meghan’s evolving relationships with Nat and Caitlin have the narrative effect of concealing Meghan’s own personal history. The more involved Meghan becomes in the women’s lives, the more mental energy she devotes to thinking about them and the more space she devotes to describing their experiences over her own. Over the course of Chapters 8 through 13, details regarding Meghan’s family and home life recede to the margins of the page. This formal effect shrouds Meghan’s character and implies that Meghan has secrets from which she is trying to hide.
Kubica’s choices surrounding point of view and character voice facilitate this ambiguity. Because Meghan is a first-person narrator, hers is the only voice presenting the narrative facts, and her declarative way of conveying information opens up at least two possibilities. On the one hand, Meghan’s assertiveness may suggest that she is a truthful narrator; however, it could also hint that she wants to appear confident and therefore blameless, implying that she is manipulating the truth. These questions about Meghan’s narrative reliability augment the narrative tension and accelerate the narrative pacing while foreshadowing coming narrative revelations.
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