End of Story

Madeleine Trapp, Sebastian and Hope’s daughter and Cole’s older sister is the second point-of-view character and protagonist. She lives in her own suite at the manor house, and while she wants to take care of her father, she can’t handle doing much more than being around for him and her step-mother, Diana. She wants to write but is bad at it, and while she volunteers at the local library, she doesn’t get paid.

Like Nicky, Madeleine demonstrates The Importance of Support During Psychological Struggle. However, where Nicky’s character evidences the positive impact support can have, Madeleine reveals what can happen when a person lacks support. Because she killed her mother accidently, a secret she hasn’t told anyone, she feels she needs to atone by being a presence in her father’s life that her mother no longer could fulfill. This has led her to stagnate in life. Madeleine is torn between resenting Nicky’s presence and liking her, as she feels she—not Nicky—should be the one to tell Sebastian’s story, all the while knowing her writing isn’t sufficient. She is the one person Nicky trusts to communicate with as Cole during the book, and her confession at the end is one of the big reveals of the novel.

Charismatic, mysterious, and tortured, Sebastian Trapp is a bestselling mystery novelist and the subject of years of speculation and scrutiny due to the real-life disappearance of his wife and son. He is experiencing kidney failure, and since he will die shortly, has decided to have someone, Nicky Hunter, write his memoirs.

Sebastian’s fear for his son, whose difference he didn’t understand, led him to mistreat Cole and drive his son and wife away. He is enough of a mystery writer to notice the clues Nicky unintentionally gives when she contacts him, and so he invites Nicky to San Francisco knowing she was once Cole. At the end, he reveals he did this to get to know her before he dies. As shared fans of crime fiction, the pair reveal The Role of Insider Language in Creating Psychological Intimacy.

Sebastian’s tough, military father’s death by suicide left an impression on him, and he lives his life fighting a similar urge. In the end, he shoots himself in the maze near the ocean where Cole was conceived.

Diana Trapp is Sebastian’s second wife and former social assistant to Hope, his first wife. She is in her forties and extremely beautiful. Like Hope, she is from England. Despite her beauty, she has a modest, shy smile and a conservative style. The tragedy of her life was losing her husband and unborn child on the way home from their baby shower in a car accident, and she has never recovered. She married Sebastian because they both shared a deep and unending grief for their lost family members. When Nicky arrives, however, she tells her she feels like something in her life is changing and begins to wake up to the reality of the family dynamics. This increased attention leads to her death when she confronts Sebastian about how Madeleine got the necklace Hope was wearing on the night of her murder and Sebastian kills her to save Madeleine.