Tully Hart—Kate Mularkey friendship

Tully Hart and Kate Mularkey’s friendship is the story’s defining chosen-family bond: a source of shelter through trauma and loss, but also a relationship whose deep trust makes its rupture especially consequential. From Tully’s first experience of Kate’s unasked-for comfort to their later separation and return to one another’s bedside, the friendship repeatedly tests what care means—and whether devotion can survive a serious breach of trust.

The First Work of Trust

When Tully begins to cry, Kate does not demand an explanation or try to correct her. She simply hugs her. Tully initially flinches at the unfamiliar contact and tries to pull away, but then clings to Kate, afraid that without her she will drift away and be lost. The physical gesture makes the friendship more than a declaration: for Tully, who cannot remember the last time someone held her this way, it briefly becomes the experience of being kept safe.

That safety allows Tully to disclose what happened to her. She says that she was raped, unable at first to turn and look at Kate because shame makes her dread seeing judgment reflected in her friend’s face. Kate’s first response is a quiet question about whether Tully is okay. The scene gives their friendship a durable pattern: Tully risks telling the truth, while Kate meets the disclosure with presence rather than blame. The bond does not erase the trauma, but it gives Tully someone to witness it with her.

Grief and the Practice of Staying

The same form of care recurs when Tully tells Kate that her grandmother has died. Tully names the people and forces behind her anger—Cloud, Gran, and God—then shares the loss. Kate’s response brings the apology and compassion Tully has been longing for; Tully breaks into heaving sobs, and Kate holds her without trying to fill the silence. Friendship here is practical emotional shelter: Kate allows grief to take the space it needs.

Later, that steadiness runs in both directions. After Kate is badly injured, Tully insists on staying beside her in the ambulance. Kate is barely conscious, pale and glassy-eyed, as the paramedics take her into the hospital; Tully is left watching her best friend disappear through the doors. The repeated reassurance that she is there cannot control the danger, but it makes presence the action Tully can offer. Their friendship is not only built from old promises; it is renewed in moments when one of them is frightened and the other refuses to leave.

Family, Trust, and the Breach

The intimacy of the friendship is expressed in Tully’s question to Kate, “What would I do without you, Katie?” Leaning against Kate as she says it, Tully treats her friend as a source of support without which she cannot imagine managing. The closeness is not incidental to the rest of their lives: Kate reflects that friendships, like marriages, acquire routines and patterns early and harden into enduring forms. That image captures both their security and their difficulty changing course when those patterns are injured.

The sharpest break comes when Tully arranges a televised intervention about Kate and her daughter, Marah. Kate realizes that the family’s private crisis is being presented to a national audience and understands the program as a public judgment that she is a bad mother. She pulls away from Tully. Tully says she is trying to help and explains that Johnny asked her to intervene, but her intention does not restore Kate’s consent or trust. When Johnny confronts Tully—saying that Kate trusted her and that the family trusted her—the conflict is no longer simply about whether the intervention might help. It is about what Tully’s decision has done to the friendship that made such access possible.

Kate tells Tully to leave and calls the matter a family issue. Tully answers that she thought she was family, a line that reveals both the closeness she believed they shared and the boundary Kate is now enforcing. In the months that follow, Kate stops waiting for Tully to call. She grieves their lost friendship, then accepts that an apology will have to come from Tully, as it has before. This time, Kate refuses to yield. The familiar pattern of repair cannot simply be repeated: affection remains, but Kate will not make reconciliation her responsibility again.

Estrangement, Return, and Care at the End

The separation becomes tangible when Kate calls Tully and reaches her answering machine. She begins with an apology-demanding complaint that Tully has not called, trying to make her need sound ordinary. Thunder and lightning break across the Sound; after a click, Kate asks whether Tully is listening, but receives no answer. The unanswered call condenses the estrangement into an attempted connection that cannot become a conversation. What Kate wants is not vague closeness but an acknowledgment of the injury and an apology from the person who caused it.

When they are together again in the hospital, their friendship must meet a changed reality. Johnny warns Tully that Kate is fragile because cancer has affected her brain, that her faculties fluctuate, and that she may not know who Tully is. The warning places their old intimacy under uncertainty: shared history cannot guarantee recognition in the present. Yet Tully stays. On Kate’s last night in the hospital, she persuades Johnny to take the children home and takes his place in the other bed. She pushes her bed close beside Kate’s, brings a recording of her final show, and watches it with her friend. Their bedside companionship echoes the closeness of childhood friends at a sleepover, but now it unfolds under the pressure of Kate’s illness and possible loss.

What the Friendship Can—and Cannot—Repair

Across the novel, Tully and Kate’s friendship functions as a chosen family capable of receiving what ordinary family relationships have failed to hold: Tully’s disclosure of sexual violence, her grief after her grandmother’s death, and the fear that arises when Kate is taken to the hospital. Its care is made legible through specific acts—an embrace, silent company during tears, insisting on riding in the ambulance, and moving a hospital bed beside Kate’s.

The same closeness creates the conditions for profound hurt. Tully’s belief that she is helping Kate does not excuse making their family crisis public, and Kate’s insistence on an apology marks a limit to the friendship’s old habit of returning to familiar patterns. Their later reunion does not make that breach irrelevant. Instead, the final bedside scene shows care continuing in a form suited to the moment: not as a claim that everything has been repaired, but as Tully’s decision to be beside Kate when friendship can offer companionship even where it cannot command what comes next.