Quinn's grief over Samantha's addiction and death

Quinn’s grief over Samantha Maybrook’s addiction and death shapes how she experiences both public scrutiny and private distress. Her mother’s opioid use, progression to heroin, and fatal overdose become more than family history: they are a wound Quinn tries to hide, a loss her father helps her endure, and a memory that returns in bodily as well as emotional forms. The novel’s account of their relationship resists a clean passage from bereavement to recovery. Quinn can begin to feel better and still be caught off guard by grief later.

Addiction, Overdose, and Public Exposure

Quinn’s distress begins before Samantha’s death, as the family lives with addiction and the possibility of another overdose. Samantha had promised to get clean before what Quinn understands as the last overdose. At school, the private history becomes public knowledge: people search online for details, and Quinn hears whispers about her mother’s drug use. The exposure turns bereavement into a social burden. Quinn is not only remembering Samantha; she is also anticipating how classmates will reduce her mother, and by extension her family, to a story about addiction.

Quinn’s therapist, Dr. Mennin, recognizes her wish to disappear as a form of withdrawal rather than a workable way to cope. Quinn resents being told this by someone who does not have to attend school or endure the whispers. She calls the assessment unfair, yet privately accepts that Dr. Mennin has identified something real. The conflict captures the bind she occupies: avoiding attention offers temporary protection, but it also keeps her from facing the world in which the loss has occurred. Her resistance to therapy’s language does not mean she cannot recognize its truth.

The Overdose and Its Aftermath

Quinn had started seeing Dr. Mennin shortly before the overdose. In the period that followed, her experience shifted from wanting to float away to feeling flattened. Glenn Maybrook became the person who kept her connected to daily life. He pulled her out of bed, made sure he was home when she returned from school, took her to the movies, and made sure she ate. At night, he lay on the floor beside her bed until she fell asleep. These concrete acts do not erase Samantha’s absence; they give Quinn support through days when even getting up and eating require help.

That care could not prevent Glenn’s own grief from surfacing. Quinn recalls that eventually he fell apart, after having been the one to hold her through the immediate aftermath. Dr. Mennin’s repeated reminder that grief does not follow dates gives this change a framework: the passage of time does not guarantee that loss has ended, and a person who has supported someone else can still be overwhelmed by bereavement. Quinn’s recollection holds both truths together—the help her father gave and his later collapse—without treating either as a betrayal of the other.

Grief’s Return in the Present

At a dance with Cole Hill, Quinn becomes acutely conscious of the people watching them and thinks about calling Dr. Mennin. She sees the impulse to contact her therapist as evidence that she still needs professional help. The moment matters because it arrives amid a scene that might otherwise suggest ordinary social ease: Quinn is dancing, yet attention turns into exposure, recalling the school whispers and her urge to disappear. Her grief has not simply kept her apart from other people; it can re-enter precisely when she is trying to take part in life.

Later, moving through a cornfield with Janet Murray, Quinn feels leaves strike her face and dry corncobs bounce against her head. The leaves scrape like tiny paper cuts, and her face is wet. In that physical discomfort, she imagines the ghost of her mother returning in her features and taking over her body. The image makes grief feel less like a settled memory than an intrusion into the present self. The field is dark and quiet, and Quinn wonders where the other partygoers have gone and whether anyone else escaped. Fear in the immediate scene and the older loss occupy the same moment, without the narration needing to make them identical.

What the Loss Means to Quinn

The novel also sets Samantha’s death against a later moment when Quinn has taken a human life, even though that life ended while its owner was doing something horribly evil. Quinn does not know what she expected to feel afterward. She does, however, understand the difference in the losses: Samantha’s death meant something and fundamentally changed who Quinn was, while the later death leaves her uncertain about her response. This contrast does not lessen the horror of either experience. It shows that Quinn’s feelings about death are shaped by relationship and history, not by the bare fact that someone has died.

The recollection of Samantha’s medical care sharpens that history. Before Quinn’s childhood joke about having a junkie mother, Samantha had received an opioid prescription for pain alongside a stool softener, because the opioid could cause constipation. On the first night, worried about the painkiller, Samantha took only a third of a pill, a sliver so small she needed a spoon. Glenn joked about Quinn’s mother, and Quinn laughed. Later, neither of them laughed on the way to collect Samantha from rehabilitation in February 2017 or in the funeral traffic leaving Laurel Hill Cemetery. These sharply different scenes register the distance between an earlier, casual joke and the consequences that followed; the account does not suggest that the prescription alone explains Samantha’s addiction.

Quinn’s relationship to her mother is therefore marked by love and grief alongside the shame and anger produced by addiction’s public aftermath. The memories do not arrange themselves into a simple lesson or a completed recovery. Instead, they return through school gossip, her father’s care, a therapist’s challenge, and the startling sense of her mother’s face appearing in her own. Grief remains part of Quinn’s life, changing its pressure and form rather than disappearing on schedule.