Things We Hide From the Light

Angelina Solavita’s name suggests the contradictory nature of her character. As her first name indicates, she is Nash’s protective angel—caring, compassionate, and unapologetically emotionally intrusive. But her last name points to the way she has lived most of her life. Sola vita is loose, ungrammatical Latin for “a life alone,” and for most of the novel Lina keeps everyone at a remove: “I like my own space” (12), she tells Nash just after they meet.

Like Nash, Lina has also been shaped by a near-death experience. At 15, she collapsed during a school soccer game from a heart defect. Despite successful surgery to repair the defect, Lina has never fully recovered from the trauma. Her approach to her PTSD is discipline: She trains in martial arts, relishes her sense of independence, and has many rules to define boundaries for her seemingly carefree peripatetic life. This balance between danger and restraint is reflected in her choice of profession: Lina is an insurance investigator, who can both assess risks and conduct perilous retrieval missions. Nash sees the contradiction when they rescue Piper from the storm drain: Lina is “warm and soft,” with smoldering blue eyes that are “wide with surprise and intimacy” (33), and yet her body is muscled and hard, her every move precise and deliberate. Her character is epitomized in her love of skydiving, a risky activity that she, a licensed skydiver, can nearly entirely control.

Lina begins the novel just as wary of people as Nash; unlike the objects she tracks down for work, people are too uncertain and undependable. Because of this, Lina has been content to travel for work, live in hotels, and indulge in the occasional weekend of consequence-free sex. This is why when she meets Nash, the powerful sexual attraction at first masks the pull of the heart she has protected most of her life. But Nash upends that life and convinces Lina that commitment and vulnerability are emotionally rewarding—a new perspective that convinces her to give up life on the road for marriage and children.

Tate Dilton, a rogue cop in Nash’s police department, is the novel’s villain, a reptilian character uncomplicated by any positive virtues. In every scene, he reveals darker and more disturbing levels of unpleasantness.

Readers first encounter Dilton as a racist who pulls over a Black couple driving home to Washington in a luxury car. Readers then see his misogyny and sexual aggression, as he accosts women in the town bar. Finally, readers learn that Dilton is married and has a child—when his wife leaves him for the safety of her parents’ house, the novel implies the possibility of emotional and physical abuse. Added to these offenses, Dilton lacks respect for Nash’s authority and leads a small gang of bullies. He sees his badge and gun only as tools to torment the vulnerable.

Dilton begrudges the fact that Nash was promoted to police chief. This partially explains the fact that Dilton was the one who shot Nash; Dilton’s unwillingness even at the moment of death to offer any reason for wanting Nash dead is striking. In a novel that celebrates redemption, Dilton is irredeemable—when Nash kills him, the world becomes a better place.