Fear of abandonment

Fear of abandonment is a recurring force in Queenie Jenkins’s relationships and recovery. It links the insecurity of her childhood to adult patterns of self-protection: she longs for reassurance, yet expects affection to be withdrawn; she seeks control over intimacy, yet fears that being fully known will end in rejection. The novel treats this fear not as an isolated weakness, but as a response shaped by family neglect, painful relationships, and the racialized judgments Queenie encounters in public and private life.

Origins in Childhood

In counseling with Janet, Queenie begins to describe a childhood in which her stepfather Roy alternated between screaming at her and ignoring her. She had tried to minimize this history by pointing to the clean house, its garden, and Roy’s cooking, but Janet insists that being either shouted at or disregarded was important to Queenie’s development. The contrast matters: outward signs of a settled home did not make it emotionally safe for her.

Queenie recalls being punished and destabilized in other ways. Roy broke her belongings, falsely accused her to her mother, and made her sleep in a car. After he persuaded Sylvie to sell their small house and move to another home, Queenie describes the new household as governed by a demand for spotless order. Roy’s conduct narrowed the space in which she could feel secure, while Sylvie’s increasing silence left Queenie without the protection she needed from the adults around her.

The deepest rupture came when Queenie was eleven. A flat was rented initially for her and Sylvie after Roy wanted them out, but Sylvie returned to Roy, leaving the flat as Queenie’s home alone. Janet identifies the situation as dangerous for a vulnerable child. Queenie, by contrast, remembers it as preferable to living with Roy, whose treatment had made her feel hated and unable to fit his idea of a household. The separation taught her that a person she depended on might remain in a damaging relationship while she was left to manage by herself.

Intimacy and Self-Protection

As an adult, Queenie can connect her unease with holding hands and hugging to a fear that tenderness will be taken away, leaving her abandoned. That expectation makes closeness threatening even when she wants comfort. In sessions with Janet, she recognizes that she had been highly dependent on friends to confirm her thoughts and actions, and on Tom in a relationship whose dependence frightened her. She connects that fear with self-sabotage: emotional investment seemed to expose her to a loss she could not control.

Her sexual relationships offer a different form of attempted protection. Queenie and Janet discuss how casual sex has served to validate Queenie’s body and give her a sense of control. In a later confrontation during therapy, Queenie explains that she has wanted comfort after sex and tried to draw close to Guy while he slept, only to be pushed away. She understands this rejection as part of a wider pattern in which she can be desired physically but does not feel eligible for love. The episode makes visible the conflict at the heart of her coping strategy: sex can provide attention on terms she tries to control, but it cannot guarantee the tenderness and acceptance she wants.

Rejection Beyond the Family

Queenie’s fear of being unwanted is also intensified by racism. In therapy she describes how others reduce her to stereotypes and sexualize her rather than approach her with the kind of romantic interest they show her friends. She connects these experiences to a fear that she cannot have love without also fearing rejection for being who she is. Her account locates that anxiety in treatment she encounters, not simply in a private difficulty with confidence.

A workplace meeting about Black Lives Matter offers another instance of isolation. Queenie explains that the movement calls attention to lives that have not been treated as mattering, but receives no visible support from the white colleagues around her. She leaves feeling more alone than before. The scene does not equate workplace disagreement with her childhood abandonment; rather, it shows how being left unsupported in a room can renew a familiar sense of exclusion. At Brockwell Lido, a public confrontation and the strangers’ stares feed a mounting panic, again turning the fear of not belonging into an immediate bodily crisis.

Recognition and an Uneven Recovery

Counseling gives Queenie a way to name connections she had not previously understood. She traces her fears about closeness, her reliance on sexual attention, and her self-sabotage with Tom back to a longer history of neglect and the expectation that care will not last. When discussing her mother, she also revises a simpler account of who was hurt and who had failed to protect her. She recognizes Sylvie’s losses and isolation under Roy, while still confronting the consequences of having been left alone. That recognition complicates Queenie’s understanding of her mother; it does not undo what happened to her as a child.

At a later point, Queenie still misses Tom and wonders whether an apology might reopen the relationship. Yet she also identifies what she would require of a future partner: availability, honesty, and respect for her safety. As she considers deleting Tom’s contact, she recalls that he once promised not to abandon her. The memory gives the decision its emotional weight: letting go means relinquishing not only a former partner but also the reassurance attached to that promise. Queenie deletes the contact, an act of movement rather than proof that the fear has disappeared.

The novel therefore presents abandonment fear as persistent but increasingly legible. Queenie’s tools for coping, including breathing and imagining a safe space, help her meet anxiety without promising that it will never return. Her changing understanding of the past makes room for recovery while preserving the force of what shaped her. Fear remains part of her experience, but it no longer has to remain unnamed or dictate every choice about intimacy.