Kate Mularkey and Tully Hart’s friendship

Kate Mularkey and Tully Hart’s friendship is the novel’s enduring chosen-family bond: first a refuge from loneliness, then a shared dream, and finally a relationship tested by the harms its members can inflict on one another. Its history does not depend on perfect understanding. Kate and Tully misread, challenge, and sometimes wound each other; again and again, the friendship’s meaning emerges in the act of returning and staying.

Intimacy, trust, and chosen family

The friendship is rooted in care that arrives before either girl knows how to ask for it. When Tully begins to cry, Kate comes close and hugs her. Tully initially flinches; physical comfort feels foreign and unexpected. But she cannot pull away. She clings to Kate with the fear that, without her, she might drift off and be lost. The embrace makes visible how much Tully needs a dependable presence, and how quickly Kate becomes one.

That trust allows Tully to disclose the rape she has suffered. She tells Kate while looking out over a field, saying the truth feels like a fire inside her that she must release. Shame keeps her from turning to see Kate’s response. Kate does not answer with blame or a lecture: after a long silence, she quietly asks whether Tully is okay. The disclosure and its reception establish a crucial distinction between the danger Tully has experienced and the care she finds in Kate. Their closeness is not simply companionship; it gives Tully a place to speak what she has been carrying.

Kate’s listening also matters in grief. When she returns after being away, Tully tells her that her grandmother has died, naming Cloud, Gran, and God as targets for her anger. Kate’s sympathy brings the release Tully has been waiting for: she sobs while Kate holds her without trying to hurry or explain the grief away. The scene repeats the earlier embrace but changes its context. Kate is no longer only the unexpected comforter; she has become the person Tully expects to be sorry for her and to stay while she cries.

Shared ambition and the limits of advice

As young adults, Kate and Tully imagine their friendship extending into work. When Tully gets an internship at KVTS, she tells Kate she will build a path into the station and, by the time they graduate, persuade it to hire Kate too. She pictures them as a team, “just like we always said.” The promise joins affection to ambition: Tully’s professional ascent is imagined not as an escape from Kate but as a future they can enter together.

Kate’s concern for Tully can also take the form of blunt opposition. She advises against Tully dating Chad, pointing to his age, his former marriage, the daughter he never sees, and the fact that he cannot be seen publicly with Tully without risking his job. She worries that the relationship is making Tully miss her college years. Tully rejects the judgment sharply, mocking Kate’s idea of college life and her taste in men. The argument is not a simple contest between a wise friend and a reckless one: Kate’s misgivings come from concern, but her attempt to guide Tully touches the independence Tully is asserting for herself.

The conflict does not erase the attachment. After Kate apologizes, Tully’s face crumples with relief; she calls Kate a real bitch, but the exchange marks a return rather than a final break. When Tully announces that she has secured the internship, her excitement immediately turns back toward their shared future. She insists that Kate still wants to be a team and hurries away to tell Chad only after telling her friend first. The moment shows both the durability of their plan and its vulnerability: Kate has begun to consider a different life, while Tully still assumes the promise is unchanged.

Unspoken feelings and reciprocal blindness

The friendship’s intimacy does not guarantee complete honesty. Kate wants Johnny, while Tully does not realize it; Johnny wants Tully, without recognizing Kate’s feelings. Their unspoken desires create a silent triangle in which the two friends, despite their work of searching for truth, remain stubbornly blind to their own lives. Kate repeatedly approaches a confession and retreats, partly because she remembers the criticism she gave Tully about Chad. Her fear of being judged by the same standard turns candor into a risk.

When Kate finally tells Tully that she is quitting and will start an advertising job, Tully sees the decision as giving up a career for a man. Kate answers that she does not believe she is good enough for the networks, calls television news Tully’s dream, and admits that she has been in love with Johnny for years. She says she was scared to tell her friend. The disclosure changes the terms of the friendship: Kate’s choice is not merely a departure from their shared career plan but the revelation of a long-concealed love. The scene also exposes a difficult imbalance in their understanding of one another. Tully has imagined their futures as a pair, while Kate has kept both her ambitions and her desire for Johnny partly in the shadow of Tully’s larger professional dream.

Loyalty against the demands of the story

Their bond is most severely tested when Tully’s professional drive crosses into Kate’s family life. During Johnny’s medical crisis in Germany, Tully insists that her boss will fire her if she does not get the story. She tells Kate she thought her friend would understand what the news means to her and says she would never intentionally hurt Kate or Johnny. Yet she has brought a cameraman and begun filming. Kate slaps her and tells her that Johnny is not Tully’s story but her husband; as the conflict rises, she orders Tully out and declares that the room is for family only.

The fight turns their old team ideal inside out. Earlier, Tully had imagined journalism as a path the two friends could share. Here, the news story sets Tully against the person she has treated as family. The difference between professional intention and personal consequence is stark: Tully may believe Kate will understand, but Kate experiences the filming as a breach of intimacy at a moment when Johnny’s condition makes privacy and family presence paramount.

Tully does not leave for good. Kate later finds her still there, tired and nervous despite her carefully arranged appearance, holding a cup of Earl Grey with the amount of sugar Kate likes. The tea is an apology made through attention rather than argument. Kate recognizes what it means, even as accepting it would mean letting the betrayal and the slap dissolve so they can return to the track that has connected their lives. She acknowledges that the story was good, but the reconciliation is not presented as proof that the injury never happened. Their familiar closeness is a choice to resume the relationship after a real breach.

Reconciliation and the meaning of staying

The pattern of rupture and return also appears when Kate suffers a devastating medical emergency. Tully forces her way into the ambulance and repeats that she is there. At the hospital, she watches Kate being taken inside and feels the full impact of what is happening. When she later feels like an outsider in the Mularkey family, she says she should be with Kate; Kate’s mother reassures her that Kate will always need her. The exchange names a tension that has shadowed their friendship: marriage and family change the practical boundaries of belonging, but they do not cancel Tully’s place in Kate’s life.

That place is affirmed in reciprocal acts. Even with her own serious concerns, Kate has mailed out the tapes that help Tully advance. When Tully marvels that Kate was thinking of her, Kate recalls their alliance against the world and the things that do not change. Later, when Kate faces treatment in Germany, Tully promises she will meet her at the hospital and will not let her go through it alone. She checks that Kate’s mother has Marah, then invokes their best-friends-forever promise. The pledge is made concrete by travel and presence: Tully is not merely offering a sentiment but going to where Kate needs her.

At the end of Kate’s life, the friendship returns to its simplest and most revealing form. When Johnny warns that the cancer in Kate’s brain has affected her faculties and that she may not recognize Tully, the possibility of being unknown threatens the assurance on which their lifelong bond rests. Nevertheless, Tully remains. On Kate’s last night in the hospital, she persuades Johnny to take the children home and moves her bed close to Kate’s. She brings a tape of her final show; Kate jokes about what a dying woman might want to watch, and the two lie in their separate beds watching it like girls at a sleepover. The scene does not undo illness or guarantee recognition. It shows instead what the friendship has become: not the certainty that nothing will change, but the deliberate act of keeping Kate company through what cannot be changed.