Boston

Boston is both Ella’s home before the novel’s central catastrophe and the setting of its immediate aftermath: the city where she loses her mother, wakes from a coma with extensive burns, and spends eight months in hospital care. It gives shape to the life she is forced to leave behind, but remains a place she hopes to return to—to visit family, remember her mother, and reclaim a future she had once planned there.

Home Before the Accident

Before the crash, Ella’s life in Boston is defined less by tragedy than by a close bond with her mother. Her father had left when Ella was eight, but her mother was her best friend, and their modest life together felt sufficient. For Ella, the city is the setting of an ordinary, cherished independence: she was doing well at school, had friends, and expected to continue building a life on her own terms.

That sense of home is established during the drive out of Boston for a birthday ski weekend in Vermont. Her mother had arranged four days away, including a hot tub and massages after skiing. The trip begins as a surprise and an expression of their intimacy; the journey away from the city becomes the threshold into disaster. Ella is looking at her phone when a logging truck skids across an icy two-lane road and into their car. She hears her mother scream, is thrown against her seat belt, and remembers the airbag bursting in front of her before consciousness disappears.

The Crash and Hospitalization

Ella wakes three weeks later in a Boston burn unit, after doctors bring her out of an induced coma. She has second- and third-degree burns covering seventy percent of her body. Her mother did not survive the crash. Boston, therefore, becomes inseparable from the abrupt division between Ella’s former life and the painful, uncertain future that follows: she returns to consciousness in the city that had been home, but the person who made it feel like home is gone.

Her treatment extends far beyond the burn unit. Ella spends eight weeks in intensive care and then another six months in a rehabilitation clinic, for eight months in hospital altogether. During that time she undergoes seventeen operations, remains scarcely able to move, and is told that she may never walk again. The physical pain, grief, and length of treatment intensify her sense of confinement. At a low point after three months in hospital, she attempts suicide; the experience later shapes her father’s insistence that she cannot safely make decisions about living independently.

A Future Planned in Boston

Even after the accident, Boston remains the center of the future Ella wants. At eighteen, she intends to stay there, finish the high-school graduation requirements she missed through online study, and attend Boston University when she is ready. She has savings of her own, supplemented by money her father sent each month and her mother deposited without spending. Ella believes those funds are enough for college and evidence that she could manage without moving into her father’s household.

Her father’s response overrides that plan. After Ella’s suicide attempt, he has her legally declared psychologically unstable and compels her to move to California. The relocation is not simply a change of scenery: it separates her from the city where she had expected to study, from the life she shared with her mother, and from the autonomy she believed she had earned. After eight months in the hospital, she leaves Boston for her father’s home in the hills above Los Angeles, where she must live with him, his wife Jennifer, and Jennifer’s daughters.

The move also exposes how incomplete Ella’s knowledge of her family has been. Jennifer tells her that Ella’s father, Rich, met Jennifer while doing free counseling work at a Boston women’s shelter where Jennifer and her daughters were hiding from Jennifer’s abusive ex-husband. Boston thus connects the two households before they are joined: Rich’s work there is the circumstance that brought him into Jennifer’s life, though Ella had never known the story and had assumed a very different account of how they met.

Distance, Memory, and Return

Boston continues to surface in Ella’s relationships after she has moved to Los Angeles. When she speaks by phone with Cinder, she explains that the Boston area code does not mean she has stayed there: she has been living with her father in Los Angeles since leaving the hospital. She has not told Cinder about the move, partly because their renewed correspondence quickly resumed its familiar rhythm and partly because she fears that making their online friendship more concrete could change it. Boston’s number becomes a small remnant of a former life that she has not yet fully explained to him.

It also remains a place of family memory and anticipated reunion. On Ella’s birthday, her father apologizes that they cannot visit her mother’s grave that day and offers to take her to Boston during the Thanksgiving break. Ella says school may be a useful distraction, but asks to visit her mother, Abuela, and Grandpa on a later weekend. Juliette offers to show Ella the city and visit her old friends; Ella responds by imagining a summer trip to Nantucket and a Red Sox game at Fenway Park. The exchange turns Boston from a site of loss into a place her new family might encounter through her memories and invitations.

That possible return expands beyond Ella’s maternal family when her father tells her that his parents and younger brother Jack live in the San Francisco Bay Area and had visited while she was still in the Boston rehabilitation clinic. He says they are eager to meet her and that he, too, had looked forward to seeing her when the hospital called. Boston is where the long separation between father and daughter first gives way to the prospect of renewed contact, even as Ella’s own memories of it remain bound to her mother and the life she lost. The city’s significance lies in that unresolved doubleness: it is both the home she was forced to leave and the place toward which she continues to direct plans for remembrance, education, and family connection.