We Begin at the End

“I always thought [Martha] was it for you. I know we were young, but the way you looked at her.”

Vincent understands the agony and the isolation of his best friend, Sheriff Walk. By later demanding Martha as his lawyer, Vincent—certain the two will work together—fixes his friend’s lonely heart.

“You don’t need to ask if I’m alright. I’m an outlaw.”

This is Duchess’ go-to riposte whenever anyone asks her name. Fed on books about the Old West, she fancies herself a hard-core outlaw despite the reality of her tender heart and aching loneliness.

“Prison has a way of turning the light out. And this house, it’s a small flame maybe, but it’s still burning. If I let it go, if I let that last light go, then it’s all dark.”

Vincent wants to preserve his home for his children, not to ruin Darke’s ambitious plan to bring economic security to Cape Haven, but because he knows what no one else in the town knows. He is the father of Duchess and Robin, and he wants to ensure they have a home.

“I don’t think I can fix it.”

Duchess struggles to tell her mother that she has torched Darke’s strip club as payback for his mistreatment of her. It is, she fears, something that cannot be fixed. However, the novel reveals faith in the ability to fix things, repair emotional damage, and right wrongs.

“The minister once said we begin at the end. It would have made for easier years if I thought for one second that Sissy was somehow better than a wooden box.”

Hal laments his struggle to come to terms with the death of his granddaughter, now 30 years in the past. Would it have comforted him had he known she would die at such a young age? Hal doubts it.

“Guilt is decided long before the act is committed. People just don’t realize it. They think they have a choice […] but they never really did.”

This is one of those cryptic utterances Vincent delivers. Addressed to Walk, this suggests there is no such thing as free will but only the entangling confusion of events no one controls.

“When they bowed their heads in prayer, [Duchess] found Star’s face behind her eyes, so clear and untroubled she wanted to cry out. She felt tears well so kept them locked tight.”

Duchess, who fancies herself a tough outlaw and is always ready for the fight to show her strength, reveals her emotional vulnerability. Her tears reveal the depth of the trauma she has suffered and her determination not to show that emotion.

“Hope is secular, and life is fragile. And sometimes we hold on too tight, even though we know it will break.”

Given his reputation as a violent underworld kingpin, Darke reveals an emotional depth that no one, including Sheriff Walk to whom he is speaking, suspects. The line takes on an entirely different tone after the first read, and you know about his wife and daughter.

“You’re the angel with the golden hair.”

Given Duchess’ reinvention of herself as an outlaw, when Thomas sees in her only an angel, Duchess is quick to discount that. She believes she only has two choices: outlaw or angel. By the time she watches helplessly as her father kills himself for her, she will understand she is both.

“He made the drive.”

This revelation from one of Hal’s dearest friends to a disbelieving Duchess marks Duchess’ pivot point emotionally. She has long simmered in her anger against a grandfather who abandoned his family—she now finds out he struggled to stay in touch, making the long drive to Cape Haven every year on her birthday.

“Star said there was a correlation between suffering and sin.”

In sharing this with her grandfather, who has spent 30 years trying to understand why Sissy was killed, Duchess attempts to offer a solution that Hal, in his rejection of Christianity, doubts. After all, he has suffered for 30 years and cannot trace that to any sin of his.

“That’s what I loved about you. That pure belief, in good and bad and love […] it was just you and this thing. This giant fucking sickening thing that Vincent did.”

In rekindling their love, Martha and Walk rediscover the emotional bond. Martha here recalls a young Walk so confident in right and wrong, so confident the world would make sense—until the hit-and-run upended everything.

“She cursed herself, complacent, the way she had fallen into the promise of a new life. She remembered the anger, the hot twisting anger.”

In discovering her dying grandfather, Duchess reminds herself she was a fool to think that Montana could provide her life a refuge from vulnerability. Her initial reaction is to rage against that world. Her father will show her another way.

“He said life means having someone care enough to protect you.”

In its simplicity, the observation Robin offers to the minister in Hal’s church when he asks the boy about the meaning of life provides one of the novel’s themes. Despite all the characters who seem to take refuge in loneliness, each character finds their way to the security and comfort of another.

“You know the whole town, Walk. There must be someone you can lean on.”

Sadly, there is not. Walk undertakes a difficult journey of enlightenment. Against his approaching incapacitation from Parkinson’s, Walk comes to see the need for another; in this case, it’s Martha herself who poses this question.

“You think there’s such a thing as a truly selfless act, Thomas Noble?”

That is the question because only in a truly selfless act can the dark and dangerous world of Cape Haven be redeemed. Duchess poses the question—and will get her answer very soon.

“Darke was hoping for a miracle.”

As Walk unearths the scheme Darke plotted to secure a future for Cape Haven and perpetual care for his daughter, he realizes the sinister creep he believed Darke to be did not tell the man’s complete story. In pouring money into the care facility with its promising experimental treatments, Darke reveals his vulnerability.

“She said you get one great love. And you’re lucky if you find that. Anything less might as well have been nothing.”

Martha indirectly reveals the depth of her love for Walk despite their estrangement for many years. When an ex-boyfriend of Martha’s shares this with Walk, he begins to understand the promise of making his way back to Martha.

“He wouldn’t hurt her. You don’t know Darke.”

The parallel journeys of Walk and Duchess are each driven by ignorance. Walk’s obsession to demonize Darke and Duchess’ determination to exact vengeance on Vincent, whom she mistakenly believes shot her mother, are both journeys into illumination. That education begins with accepting what here an old flame of Darke’s tells Walk.

“He knew that if they studied [the break-in report] hard enough, they’d see a slight lean to the scrawl, like it was written with a shaking hand.”

In the emerging world of contradictory realities, what damns Walk as a liar and perjurer (he fakes a break-in report to show that Vincent had no access to a gun) elevates him to a hero. The shaky handwriting would, of course, reveal that Walk, suffering from Parkinson’s, had dummied the report.

“Then slowly she placed [the hat] on her head, the fit perfect. She took two guns, hers and one of his. She took a box of bullets.”

This is Duchess at her most heroic and her most flawed. In donning the cowboy hat and the pistols, she apes the outlaws of the Old West that drive her imagination. That she is going after a bad guy, however, is ironic—she is heading back to Cape Haven to murder for a crime her little brother committed.

“Tragedy has a way of making saints out of sinners. Believe me, I know.”

Although this seems like something the jailhouse mystic Vincent might say, this is Darke revealing to Walk the complexity of the moral universe. There is no place for good and evil, right or wrong. Although he refers to the car accident that killed his wife and left his daughter braindead, this could also refer to Sissy’s hit-and-run.

“A girl on her way to right a lifetime of wrongs.”

If the novel tracks Duchess’ coming of age, here as she heads for her showdown with the Bad Guy is the moment just before her epiphany, her loss of the simple child world of good and evil.