Andrew Bloom and Atlas Corrigan (adversaries)

The enmity between Andrew Bloom and Atlas Corrigan is the buried fault line beneath the entire novel, the violent rupture that splits Lily Bloom's adolescence in two and quietly dictates the shape of her adult life. It is not a feud between equals but a collision between a man who embodies the town's respectability and a boy who embodies its shame, and its consequences never stop compounding. The relationship begins in secrecy, explodes into a near-fatal beating, and then hardens into a silence that Lily carries for years, even as she builds a new life in Boston. Everything that follows—her marriage to Ryle Kincaid, her tolerance of his violence, her eventual flight to Atlas for safety—can be traced back to the night her father came down on Atlas with a baseball bat.

Origins in Secrecy and Class

The hostility has its roots in a hidden friendship. Lily grew up in a fairly decent neighborhood in Maine, but the street behind her house was in poor condition, and her backyard butted up against a condemned house flanked by two abandoned lots. It was there that Atlas, a senior at her school, was secretly living, and no one knew except Lily. She used to bring him food, clothes, and other supplies, a quiet act of charity that defied the social order of their town. The other students knew nothing about him beyond his name and his smell; when Lily asked Katie about him on the bus, Katie rolled her eyes, said she knew nothing else about him, and scrunched up her nose as if he disgusted her. Lily wanted to yell at Katie that Atlas could not help it, that he had no running water, but she held her tongue. The town's contempt for Atlas was not incidental—it was the precondition for Andrew's violence. Lily's father, who had never once given to charity and who lectured her in a grocery store about how homeless people simply did not want to work, represented the exact worldview that made Atlas an acceptable target. Lily had once believed her father's claims that homeless people were lazy or addicted, but knowing Atlas taught her otherwise: people are homeless because there is not enough help to go around, and people like her father use worst-case scenarios to excuse their own selfishness and greed.

The Beating and Its Aftermath

The secret friendship could not stay hidden forever. One night, before Atlas arrived, Lily had not thought to lock her bedroom door, and when her father heard her talking to someone, he threw the door open and found Atlas in bed with her. He was angrier than Lily had ever seen him, and Atlas, unprepared for what came next, was at a complete disadvantage. Lily would never forget the moment for as long as she lived: being completely helpless as her father came down on him with a baseball bat, the sound of bones snapping the only thing piercing through her screams. She never learned who called the police—she assumed it was her mother—but by the time they arrived and pulled her father off Atlas, she did not even recognize him, he was covered in so much blood. Lily was hysterical, so much so that the ambulance had to take her as well; it was the first and only panic attack she ever had. No one would tell her where Atlas was or whether he was okay. Her father was not even arrested. Instead, word got out that Atlas had been homeless and living in the old house, and Andrew became revered for his heroic act of saving his little girl from the homeless boy who had manipulated her into sex. Lily's father told her she had shamed the whole family by giving the town something to gossip about, and the gossip persisted for years. When Katie repeated the slander on the bus, Lily turned around and told her she could go to hell, insisting Atlas was a better human than Katie would ever be. Katie only rolled her eyes and asked whether Atlas had brainwashed her, calling him a dirty, thieving homeless kid who was probably on drugs and had used Lily for food and sex.

The Silence That Followed

That night ended Lily's correspondence with Ellen and her contact with Atlas alike. She never heard from him again, and a huge part of her never blamed him—he had almost died at the hands of her father, and there was not much room for forgiveness there. Over the years, her curiosity sometimes got the best of her, and she would search online for any trace of him, finding just enough to know he had survived and joined the military. She never got him out of her head, though; time made things better, but a stray reminder could put her in a funk. It was not until she had been in college for a couple of years and was dating someone else that she realized Atlas was perhaps not supposed to be her whole life, only a part of it. The wound of that night never fully closed, and it resurfaced years later when she told Ryle the story on a rooftop in Boston, her jaw tightening as she forced herself to speak about the thing she still tried not to think about on a daily basis. Ryle regarded her silently, as if he knew there was more to the story, but he let it drop.

The Legacy of the Adversarial Bond

The enmity between Andrew and Atlas did not end with the beating; it became the template for Lily's understanding of violence and safety. When Ryle pushed her down the stairs and she needed somewhere to go, she ran to Atlas, even though he was the very reason Ryle had been angry at her. She felt awkward and guilty being there, as though calling Atlas lent credibility to Ryle's anger, but there was literally nowhere else she could go: Ryle could track a credit card charge to a hotel, and he could find her at her mother's, at Allysa's, at Lucy's, or even at Devin's. She could not see him tracking down Atlas, though, and she felt safer there than anywhere else, in part because Atlas had an alarm system. The irony was stark: the boy her father had beaten and branded a predator had become the only man she trusted to protect her from her husband. Years later, when Atlas finally told her he felt his life was good enough for her now and that he would be ready whenever she was, Lily felt like she was fifteen again, her neck and cheeks flushing—but she was not fifteen. The adversarial relationship between her father and Atlas had cost her that innocence, but it had also, in the end, delivered her to the one person who had never hurt her. The novel's authorial voice makes the point explicit: Lily's mother left a man she loved so that her daughters would never think that kind of relationship was okay, and she was not rescued by a knight in shining armor—she took the initiative herself. Lily made the same ultimate decision to leave Ryle for the sake of her daughter, and in doing so, she finally broke the cycle that Andrew's violence had set in motion.