42 pages • 1 hour read
Andrea BartzWe Were Never Here
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A 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 35-43Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 35-37 Summary
Alarmed by the CNN article, Emily emails Kristen in the pair’s coded language, telling her to check the news. On the drive to the hotel, Aaron confesses to Emily that Kristen approached him and told him that Emily was unwell and that she was trying to get over having “hurt someone” in Chile. Horrified, Emily tells Aaron the truth about Sebastian’s sexual assault in Cambodia, but nothing more—she dismisses Kristen’s statement as a divisive lie. The next day, Aaron and Emily wake up ready for a hike, but as they head out the hotel lobby’s doors, Emily once again hears Kristen calling her name.
Chapter 37 takes the form of a press release stating that a police sketch has been released of Paolo’s murderer; the description sounds a lot like Kristen.
Chapters 38-40 Summary
In the hotel lobby, Kristen acts like the coded message was an obvious plea for her to come to Phoenix, but Emily says this interpretation is ridiculous. The two begin fighting, and Aaron, uncomfortable, excuses himself to go back up to the room. Soon after, the pair walks outside where they can talk more freely. They wander until they reach a cliff’s edge.
Emily confesses that she wishes Sebastian and Paolo were both still alive, even if one or both of them were rapists. She flashes back to memories of her cruel father punishing her for normal child behavior, like singing silly songs, making her feel small and frightened. Then, she visualizes Sebastian’s death again, and this time, full of anger, she feels confident that Kristen was telling the truth: It was she, Emily, who kicked him to death. Armed with the surety that she is a killer, she suddenly realizes Kristen is probably planning to kill her, convinced she’ll soon crack and tell Aaron or Adrienne. Instead, she decides to act first: She pushes Kristen off the cliff.
Rather than falling to her death, however, Kristen grabs onto a shrub on the cliff’s face. Immediately regretting her action and deciding she isn’t a killer, Emily helps her up. Suddenly, she hears the motor of a car coming toward them as she tells Kristen she doesn’t know what came over her. Just as the car approaches, Kirsten responds, “I do,” and pushes Emily in front of it.
The driver reacts quickly, slamming on his brakes. Emily barely has time to register that the driver is Aaron before the car swerves to the side because of its sudden stop, taking both itself and Kristen over the cliff’s edge.
Another news article chapter reveals that medical examiners found Rohypnol in Paolo’s bloodstream: He was drugged before he was killed.
Chapters 41-43 Summary
Emily flags down a passing driver and calls 911. Police cars and fire trucks arrive, but Emily has to make a statement at the police station. She words it carefully, leaving out her and Kristen’s fight and merely saying that she was standing in the road as Aaron approached and didn’t hear him coming, requiring him to swerve to avoid hitting her.
When she finishes her statement, she goes to the hospital to await news on Aaron and Kristen. After waiting for many hours, she sees a couple enter and hears them identify themselves to hospital staff, saying they’ve come to see their goddaughter, Kristen Czarnecki. Emily recognizes the last name, Rusch: Jamie Rusch was Kristen’s childhood best friend who died by suicide.
When Emily approaches them, the Rusches explain that they have been living in Las Vegas for many years, and Nana and Bill called and asked them to be there while they flew down from Milwaukee. Gambling that Tom and Jenny Rusch share some of her own feelings about Kristen, Emily confesses to them part of the truth, that Kristen stalked her, followed her to Phoenix against her will, and had grown increasingly frightening lately.
A doctor interrupts to say that Kristen is in critical condition, but Aaron will likely make a complete recovery given time and physical therapy. Jenny proposes that she can take Emily back to her hotel so she can gather some things for Aaron for when he wakes up. On the drive, Jenny reveals the entire tragic backstory of Kristen and Jamie’s friendship. The girls were friends since birth, but as they grew, Kristen would misbehave and then convince Jamie to take the blame. Hearing this, Emily feels certain Kristen did the same to her with Sebastian, that her long history of gaslighting friends settles the matter and that it really was Kristen who killed him, just like Emily originally thought.
Kristen’s father, Jamie’s basketball coach, sexually abused Jamie. Recalling how much Kristen hated him, Emily wonders if he sexually abused his own daughter as well, but she never gets an answer to this question. Jamie thought the only way to end the abuse was to kill Kristen’s father, so she set the house fire, thinking Kristen and her mother were out of the house. As Kristen escaped through a window, she saw Jamie fleeing the scene. Shortly after, Jamie died by suicide. Jenny had no further contact with Kristen until Kristen sent her a friend request on Facebook a few years before the novel’s present action.
Jenny asks Emily for more details about what was going on between her and Kristen, but when Emily says she cannot explain further, Jenny warns that the Phoenix police are unlikely to accept that answer and will probably charge Aaron with attempted murder.
Chapters 35-43 Analysis
Much of the novel from this point forward consists of plot exposition and resolving various mysterious threads. By now, however, the central mystery has shifted. Although the novel began by calling into question whether Kristen’s story about Paolo is truthful, it quickly offered up ample evidence that she is more devious and calculating than Emily knows. Now, the novel’s mystery surrounds Emily—whether she’s been lying to herself for a full year, whether she’s capable of fatal violence, whether she contains levels of anger she cannot recognize consciously. Bartz asks whether Emily has been Kristen’s self-deluded double this whole time.
For the moment at the cliff’s edge when Emily decides to push Kristen, the answer to these questions seems to be “yes.” However, her instant regret shows that her murderous anger is merely a costume she was temporarily trying on; inhabiting that mindset allows her to momentarily feel less like a victim at the hands of men such as her father and Sebastian. Her rage is directed as much at them as it is at Kristen. The release of giving in to that anger feels good temporarily, but it is not the state Emily wants to live in permanently. Ruthless self-protection, she realizes, is not worth changing her entire self.
Just as Bartz resolves questions about Emily’s nature in this section, she also answers questions about Kristen. After absorbing Jenny’s story, Emily gathers that while Kristen did premeditate Paolo’s murder, she is not guilty of Jamie’s or her parents’ deaths. She did exhibit manipulative behavior from a young age, but as far as the reader knows, she was not born without a conscience or filial affection. Rather, her profound childhood trauma—her father’s sexual predation, her parents’ sudden deaths, and her best friend’s involvement in both—likely played a huge part in the person she later became. Thanks to her father, Kristen was exposed to a cycle of childhood abuse that she grew up to perpetuate. These details give Kristen’s character a new sympathetic context, even if her actions remain inexcusable.
