47 pages • 1 hour read
Emma GreyThe Last Love Note: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 25-31Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 25 Summary
In the present moment, Kate and Hugh return to their cottage. Kate takes some photographs, then lies in the hammock and thinks about writing her book. Kate’s mom video-calls her, and Kate chats with Charlie before asking her mother how she is doing. Kate’s mom asks who “broke” Hugh, and Kate suddenly wonders about Hugh’s past. She tells her mom they’re just colleagues, but her mom states that Kate has integrated Hugh into their family. Kate’s mom thinks Kate should take a leap and leave her job, and Kate admits she is terrified to do that. Hugh returns from a walk on the beach, and Kate thinks, “He doesn’t look broken to me. He seems more assured and in control than ever” (225). But, she thinks, if she loses her heart again, it will kill her. She’s not afraid of intimacy, Kate realizes; she’s afraid of loss.
Chapter 26 Summary
Kate continues talking with Hugh, explaining that here, she finally feels uncaged. “I feel like Kate the woman,” she tells him. “Not the widow. Not the wife. Not the mum. Not the employee. Just a woman, with a blank page in front of her” (230). She wonders if she has stayed at her job because Hugh made it easy for her. She teases him about not paying attention, and he says he has been paying attention every second. Kate imagines kissing Hugh and panics. She starts to reflect on a time she thought she’d lost him.
Chapter 27 Summary
The story flashes back to three years earlier. Hugh is looking haggard at work, and Kate worries he is going to pieces, but she needs his support, as caring for Cam is becoming more difficult. Kate gets a call from one of Cam’s graduate students saying he missed his lecture and they found him wandering the campus. In Cam’s office, Kate sees a stack of cards meant for Charlie through the milestones of his life. Cam starts packing up the books that have been part of his career, and Kate weeps. She approaches Hugh in his office, coming around his desk to ask him what’s wrong. She worries, “I can’t help feeling that this is not about Ruby after all. It’s somehow about me. But it’s about me in a way that I don’t think I want to find out” (239-40).
Hugh is absent for a few weeks, then he comes to Kate’s house. He says he had something he needed to think about. Kate confides about how quickly Cam is losing basic functioning skills, like continence. She feels sheltered by Hugh, protected. Hugh and Cam share a look that Kate can’t interpret. Cam has occasional outbursts, and now he says Kate should prefer Hugh, who could be a real husband. Kate insists that there will never be anyone else for her, and Hugh confirms, “She loves you, mate […] She’ll always love you. End of story” (245). Kate can’t see a future for herself when Cam is gone; his absence will be the eternal backdrop of her life.
Chapter 28 Summary
Kate comes awake in the present moment and realizes she fell asleep on the porch with her head in Hugh’s lap. She feels attracted to him and tells him she is thinking about reinvention. Hugh reminds her that he loved Cam, too. Cam said once to Kate that Hugh liked her, but she brushed it off as his declining memory. She admits she is “afraid nobody will ever love me that much again, and that I won’t have the capacity—or maybe the courage—to love anyone that much again either” (252). She presses Hugh to tell her why he is unattached, and he admits things didn’t work out with Grace because there was someone else. Kate wonders who.
Chapter 29 Summary
Kate decides that Hugh is hung up on someone else the way she’ll always be hung up on Cam. Early in the morning, she goes to the beach to watch the sunrise. Hugh joins her, and Kate feels comforted by his presence. She feels beautiful when he looks at her. She feels she is willing to put her trust “into one basket and hand it over to him, tentatively, absolutely terrified he’ll drop it.” She wants to kiss him and wonders “if he knows how enormous this is for [her]. How frightening” (258).
Chapter 30 Summary
Kate is sure Hugh read her mind with that last realization and tells herself again she can’t fall for him. His phone rings with Kate’s mother calling. Charlie reports that he has a loose tooth, and missing this makes Kate worried that she’s a bad mother. She remembers Cam warning her that, if she ever felt something for someone, she would try to run, and she starts stretching to do just that. Hugh says she makes him nervous.
Kate wonders how long it takes to recover from grief. She realizes, “You don’t recover from it. There is no ‘healed’ moment. You just absorb it into your new life, somehow, and go from there” (265).
Chapter 31 Summary
As they drive into town, Kate reflects that the landscape looks like Ireland. She thinks that she’s had her volcanic moment in the shower, and something has shifted. They stop in a bookshop, and Kate looks at two books, both about women in their 30s who want to reinvent their life. Hugh says she should write about her experience. Kate feels excited about the idea and wonders if she should give herself a fresh start. They meet Hugh’s friend from university, Andrew Jones, called Jonesy, and Kate likes him instantly. She gathers that Hugh has spoken to Andrew about her. Andrew asks if Hugh has told Kate about Genevieve.
Chapters 25-31 Analysis
In terms of dramatic movement, Kate’s realization that she is sexually attracted to Hugh, and thus contemplating moving on from Cam, presents a point of no return. This turning point highlights the centrality of Attraction and Romantic Love to both the plot and Kate’s character development. Kate cannot go back to what she was: “Grief Kate.” Instead, buying and wearing new clothes, taking photographs—a hobby she already enjoyed—and thinking of writing, an ambition she’s harbored without success, return Kate to the person she felt she was before motherhood or Cam’s illness. These connections show she is beginning to heal and confront her own sense of identity: who she is when not defined by her grief, her job, or her motherhood. The novels she finds at the bookstore provide an opportunity for Kate to make fun of this theme of reinvention, ironically pointing to a beloved convention of the women’s fiction genre to which Grey is faithfully adhering.
While the mirror in the dressing room gives Kate the chance to see herself in new ways and come to terms with where she has arrived in her life, the beach becomes a symbolic threshold where Kate witnesses the sunrise—an ageless metaphor for new beginnings—and contemplates a new time with Hugh beside her. Her increasing self-awareness includes the knowledge that Hugh is also attracted to her, but Kate’s pretense at running shows she isn’t ready to accept this. She is still questioning her own aptitude in many areas, including her ability to successfully parent, exemplified by her worry when Charlie reports a loose tooth.
The flashbacks continue to prove how long Kate’s reliance on Hugh has been going on, to the point where she fretted when he was absent, as she felt she needed him for her own emotional health. Kate’s (and Hugh’s) insistence that she will always love Cam is undercut by the moment of awareness Kate experiences on her porch, when she realizes his nearness affects her. She is already pushing into Hugh’s space by coming around behind his desk and asking questions about him. Their emotional relationship was developing long before they lost Cam, and this flashback further triangulates it. However, the secret between the two men constitutes an obstacle that leaves Kate out.
Kate’s sudden concern with a broken heart in Hugh’s past becomes another way she connects with him, as she compares his supposed longing for someone else to her unshakeable attachment to Cam. Kate’s inability to guess the object of Hugh’s affection creates strong dramatic irony, as the reader can see signaling from the opening chapters that Hugh is devoted to Kate. In these chapters, Kate turns to exploring whether Hugh could be a potential partner for her, showing an interest in his past and in meeting his friends, like Jonesy. The image of Kate transferring her trust to Hugh by putting it in a basket—a cliché that demonstrates vulnerability and possible foolishness—confirms her wish to connect to him. But with the introduction of Genevieve adds one further mystery, creating a new twist to the tension that will drive the action toward its climax and final turning point.
