Lola

Lola is presented as Gunner’s partner and as part of the informal family surrounding Hayden Devillier, Crew Devillier, and Assured Distraction. Her role is largely indirect, but the details attached to her establish a stable domestic relationship, a demanding professional life, and a desire to participate more fully in the group’s shared social world. Through Lola, the novel extends its idea of family beyond blood and the central household.

Identity and Background

Lola works at a children’s hospital, a detail that helps explain why she and Gunner live out by the lake while she is employed in the city. Hayden expects that they may eventually move back into the heart of Austin because the location would make practical sense for her work. Her occupation is not developed into a separate storyline, but it places her in a caregiving profession that quietly complements the book’s recurring attention to children, parenting, and responsibility.

Lola is also associated with Gunner’s wish to become a father. When Gunner jokes that he may soon be “doing the dad thing,” Hayden immediately asks whether Lola is pregnant. Gunner answers evasively but makes clear that they are actively trying to conceive. The exchange presents parenthood as a possible next stage in their relationship and places Lola within the book’s broader network of adults negotiating love, domestic life, and family obligations.

Relationships and Social Position

Lola’s closest identified relationship is with Gunner. Their partnership is affectionate and sexually active, and Gunner speaks of her with the confidence of someone imagining a shared future. His expectation that she will soon spend more time with the other women also suggests that she is not socially separate from the group, even though she is not present in most of its major scenes.

Her connection to Hayden’s circle is reinforced by Gunner’s promise that he and Lola will attend a football game before the band leaves town. Gunner says that Lola has been eager to spend time with the women, indicating that she wants access to the community that Hayden, Ryan Powell, Peri Powell, and the members of Assured Distraction have built around one another. Her anticipated visit is therefore more than a casual social engagement: it marks an effort to join the group’s already established network of friendship and mutual care.

That network is explicitly described as a family. Peri regards Hayden as the younger brother she never had and warns that Assured Distraction will protect him if his relationship with Timbre Simons turns harmful. Lola belongs to the same surrounding social world through Gunner, making her part of the extended structure that supports Hayden and Crew. Her presence helps show that the group’s family identity is continually expanding rather than remaining limited to biological relatives.

Function in the Plot

Lola’s most important plot function is to provide context for Gunner’s life outside the band and to connect the group’s present relationships with the possibility of future parenthood. Her work schedule calls Gunner away from the house when she is summoned by her job, leaving him reluctant to remain alone by the lake and prompting him to invite Hayden over. That small domestic circumstance brings Hayden into conversation about Gunner and Lola’s plans, including the possibility of a child.

Lola also helps define the social rhythm of the wider cast. Her wish to spend time with the women anticipates the blending of separate relationships into a communal family life. The promise that she and Gunner will attend a game, and that she will socialize with the women, places her in the recurring pattern through which partners, friends, musicians, and children become part of one another’s routines.

Narrative Significance

Lola is a peripheral character, but her limited appearances carry structural weight. She represents a relationship developing alongside Hayden and Timbre’s romance, and her possible pregnancy mirrors the novel’s persistent movement toward enlarged families and shared responsibility. While Hayden has deliberately subordinated romance to raising Crew and later considers reclaiming a personal life, Gunner and Lola appear to be moving in the opposite direction, from partnership toward parenthood.

Her role also underscores the contrast between biological and chosen family. Hayden’s life is organized around Crew, while Assured Distraction functions as a protective family in Austin; Lola’s expected integration into the women’s circle shows how that family can absorb new members through affection, loyalty, and repeated shared occasions. By the time Hayden and Timbre become engaged in front of their Austin family, the surrounding network—including figures such as Lola—helps make the proposal feel like a collective affirmation rather than an isolated romantic gesture.