The Leaving

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of kidnapping, trauma, death, child death, mental illness, addiction, and substance use.

Lucas is one of the three viewpoint characters in the novel and one of the six abducted children. His return home is marked by immediate tragedy when his father Will, upon seeing him, dies in a fall from a ledge of Opus 6, the memorial he built and dedicated to the missing abductees. This loss compounds the complex emotional struggle Lucas experiences throughout the novel; for example, he and his brother Ryan find it hard to bond in the face of this shocking tragedy, and Lucas has the chance to feel close to his father only through Will’s amassed collection of notes, videos, and clippings about The Leaving housed in the RV.

The tragic loss of his father is not the only circumstance that impacts Lucas’s struggle and character arc. He experiences significant inner conflict once he realizes he can operate a gun with a high degree of efficiency without knowing why. He knows intuitively that his fingerprints will be on the gun used to kill John Norton, the suspected kidnapper, which causes him anxiety and increases his doubts regarding the actual perpetrator.