Santa Fe functions in the novel as more than a destination. It is Cassiopée Smith’s birthplace and childhood city, a place she approaches through photography as a means of recovering personal history, while the same location unsettles her family because it preserves Ryan’s past with Cassiopée’s mother. Santa Fe therefore becomes a contested memory-space: joyful for the daughter who wants to return, painful for the father who left, and threatening to Ella, who tries to prevent the journey.

Birthplace and Personal Memory

Santa Fe is introduced through Cassiopée’s decision to leave for a photography project. She tells her friends that she has an idea and will depart the following afternoon, with a flight scheduled for around four o’clock. The plan is practical on the surface, but the destination immediately carries emotional weight because Santa Fe is the city where she was born and spent her childhood. Returning there offers Cassiopée a way to approach a formative part of herself rather than treating the project as an abstract assignment.

The journey is also shaped by absence. Cassiopée is happy to return to the city of her birth, yet she boards the train with sadness because the one person she most wants to see will not be there. Santa Fe consequently holds two opposing values at once: it is a place of belonging and anticipated discovery, but it cannot restore the relationships or circumstances that made childhood meaningful. The location gives her access to memory without giving her the past back unchanged.

A Photographic Destination

Cassiopée’s intended work turns Santa Fe into a site of artistic investigation. She explains to Ryan that she needs to prepare a project there, and she presents the trip as purposeful rather than impulsive. Her departure connects the city to the novel’s recurring use of photography as a way to preserve, revisit, and reorganize experience. The camera is not merely a tool for recording scenery; in Cassiopée’s case, it gives structure to a return whose emotional implications are difficult to state directly.

Santa Fe also becomes part of a broader geography of remembered places. While thinking about the project, Shelby Anderson Barnum considers returning to Los Angeles and photographing Santa Monica State Beach, along with other places she once loved. Against that parallel, Cassiopée’s journey to Santa Fe appears as another attempt to transform biography into images. Both women attach creative work to places that contain earlier versions of themselves, but Cassiopée’s return is especially complicated by the family history embedded in the city.

Family Conflict and the Burden of the Past

Ryan’s reaction reveals why Santa Fe cannot remain a neutral travel destination. When Cassiopée announces that she is going there, he is bewildered and asks why. She repeats that the trip concerns her project, but Ella reacts with panic as soon as the city is named. Cassiopée understands the source of that distress: Ryan lived his happiest years there with Cassiopée’s mother. Santa Fe thus preserves a chapter of Ryan’s life that Ella cannot comfortably confront.

Ella’s hostility is not directed at the city as a physical location so much as at what the city represents. She orders Cassiopée not to go further in the conversation, attempting to close off the memories that Santa Fe might reactivate. The conflict turns geography into family power. Cassiopée claims the right to visit the place connected to her own birth and childhood, while Ella attempts to regulate access to the older relationship and its emotional consequences. Ryan remains caught between those positions: he cannot deny that Santa Fe contains some of his happiest memories, but he is afraid to acknowledge that truth openly because he might hurt Ella or risk losing her.

Departure and Narrative Significance

Cassiopée finally leaves despite the unease surrounding the trip. Before boarding, she says goodbye to her two friends and promises to send photographs. Once the train begins moving, she watches the landscape pass with visible sadness. The departure gives Santa Fe a threshold function: it marks movement away from the immediate family home and toward a place where Cassiopée can encounter her own history on her own terms.

The city’s significance is heightened by the novel’s larger pattern of movement between campuses, homes, therapeutic spaces, beaches, and other remembered locations. Central Washington University in Ellensburg represents Cassiopée’s present social world; Santa Fe represents an earlier self that she is willing to seek out again. The contrast does not make the past purely restorative. Santa Fe offers the possibility of creative renewal, but the journey also confirms that memory is unevenly shared. A birthplace can be a source of identity for one person, a lost love for another, and a threat to domestic stability for someone else.

Santa Fe therefore embodies the novel’s understanding of personal rebirth as a slow and imperfect process. Returning to a former home does not erase absence, repair every family wound, or reproduce childhood. Instead, it allows the character to move through the place with the knowledge that the past remains both intimate and unreachable. The city’s decisive role lies in that tension: it is where Cassiopée hopes to make new images from old experience, and where the family’s suppressed history becomes impossible to keep entirely out of view.