Sarah

Sarah is an absent but foundational figure in the story: Bethany’s college friend, a former foster child, and the person whose death gives Bethany’s professional mission its deepest emotional force. Sarah’s experience turns adoption from an abstract social issue into a personal moral responsibility for Bethany, while her suicide creates a lasting link between the novel’s romance plot and its investigation of closed adoption, birth identity, and the meaning of a real family.

Identity and Background

Sarah had spent her life moving through the foster-care system before becoming close to Bethany at college. The available account does not provide a full biography, but it establishes the central vulnerability of her background: she had grown up without the stable family structure Bethany believed children needed. Her history also places her at the intersection of two forms of kinship that the novel repeatedly distinguishes—the family created by birth and the family created through care, legal adoption, and sustained belonging.

Sarah later reconnected with her birth parents. That reunion did not repair the injury associated with her childhood; according to Bethany, her birth parents were still as harmful as they had ever been. The attempted return to biological family therefore becomes a devastating confirmation that blood ties alone cannot guarantee safety, recognition, or love.

Death and Its Effect on Bethany

Sarah killed herself during the week before graduation. Bethany describes having been close to her, and the disclosure is presented as unexpectedly heavy even within the pair’s deliberately structured effort to learn one another’s histories. Sarah’s death is not treated as a distant anecdote: it is the private catastrophe beneath Bethany’s polished professional explanation for why she entered child welfare.

Bethany first says that she took her agency job because she knew someone who had moved through foster care and wanted to help children find real homes. When pressed for the deeper reason, she identifies Sarah’s suicide and the failed contact with her birth parents. Bethany’s reasoning is both compassionate and counterfactual: if someone had found Sarah a real family, Sarah might have been able to endure her circumstances because someone would have cared for her for her own sake. Sarah thus becomes the imagined beneficiary of every later child Bethany tries to protect.

Influence on Bethany’s Work

Sarah’s experience explains why Bethany’s work is more than a conventional career choice. Bethany is employed by an agency involved in placing children and maintaining adoption records, and her motivation is tied to the belief that a stable home can provide the care, continuity, and emotional anchor that the foster system failed to provide Sarah. Her professional purpose is therefore shaped by grief as much as by idealism.

That motivation also gives Bethany’s ethical position unusual complexity. She works to protect vulnerable children and preserve the possibility of permanent families, yet her relationship with Ransom requires her to consider granting him secure access to confidential agency files. The bargain is dangerous precisely because the files concern the kind of hidden family history that destroyed Sarah’s hope: birth parents, institutional records, and the boundaries of closed adoption. Sarah’s memory supplies the moral pressure behind Bethany’s work, even as the plot places Bethany in circumstances that threaten the confidentiality of that work.

Connection to the Adoption Plot

Sarah’s story prepares the novel for Ransom’s own search through adoption records. Ransom discovers that his adoptive parents, Janice and Raymond Nolan, had adopted him through Bethany’s agency roughly twenty years earlier. His file identifies him first as a three-year-old child named Patrick Nolan, records that he had been surrendered by his birth parents at age two, and notes minor behavioral issues associated with unstable attachment to his birth parents. The record then reveals that his birth name was Patrick Cartwright.

Ransom’s search eventually identifies Genevieve Cartwright and Alexander Cartwright as the people connected to that birth name. His discovery parallels Sarah’s attempted reconnection with her own birth parents but produces a different narrative result: where Sarah’s return exposes the continuing harm of her biological family, Ransom’s records restore a missing genealogy and give him the names he has sought for years. Sarah’s fate therefore functions as a negative possibility within the adoption plot, showing what can happen when biological origins reopen injury rather than provide belonging.

Narrative Significance

Sarah never participates in the present-day action, but her absence governs Bethany’s emotional and professional decisions. She is the story’s most concentrated example of how an unseen person can shape a living character’s values: Bethany’s work, her understanding of family, and her desire to help children find caring homes all carry the imprint of Sarah’s death.

The disclosure about Sarah also deepens the developing intimacy between Bethany and Ransom. Their arrangement begins as a transactional exchange in which Ransom offers to pose as Bethany’s boyfriend in return for access to agency files. Their preparation gradually becomes a process of reciprocal disclosure: they discuss Bethany’s work, sexual experience, and private history, while Ransom withholds his own birth identity until later. Sarah’s story is one of the first moments in which Bethany’s public cover story gives way to personal grief, making her professional mission legible as an act of remembrance as well as service.

Sarah consequently links the novel’s major concerns—attachment, adoption, secrecy, and chosen family. Her life demonstrates the consequences of being denied a dependable home; her death motivates Bethany’s attempt to prevent similar abandonment; and her failed encounter with her birth parents complicates the assumption that biological reconnection is automatically healing. Through Sarah, the novel treats family not as a simple fact of origin but as a relationship measured by care, protection, and the ability to remain present.