Angel and Rab

Angel and Rab’s relationship is a childhood bond of makeshift care that turns into betrayal. After Mae dies, Rab takes responsibility for Sarah but, burdened by poverty and guilt, ultimately hands her over to a stranger for money. The loss becomes part of the history Angel struggles to remember and helps explain why trust and tenderness remain difficult for her to accept.

Care after Mae’s death

When Mae dies, eight-year-old Sarah does not cry at first; she lies beside her mother and tries to wake her, then grieves that she wants to go with her. Rab, too, is overwhelmed by the loss. Mae had asked him to look after her daughter, and he tries to honor that promise despite being unable to offer Sarah a stable home.

After drinking, Rab falls asleep, and Sarah covers him with a blanket and tells him she will take care of him. The gesture reverses their expected roles: a bereaved child assumes responsibility for the adult who has become her remaining protector. The next morning, Rab cries over his promise to Mae and admits that he does not know what to do with Sarah.

The handover

Rab seeks help from acquaintances, then returns with a stranger who says he works for a man wishing to adopt a girl. The stranger inspects Sarah and gives Rab money, directing him to clean her up, obtain decent clothes, and bring her to a specified address. Rab presents the arrangement as an improvement in her prospects, but Sarah recoils from the stranger and asks Rab not to send her away. She offers to remain with him and care for him herself.

Rab refuses her plea, arguing that she is too young to earn money and that she will have a better life with the man who has arranged to take her. His actions contradict the promise he had made to Mae: rather than continue caring for Sarah, he delivers her into another adult’s control in exchange for payment. The episode is a decisive rupture in the relationship, leaving Sarah to understand that even the person who had tried to protect her can abandon her.

Memory and lasting consequences

As an adult, Angel’s memories of Rab remain joined to the wider sequence of childhood loss and exploitation. Rain in Michael’s cabin recalls the shack where she lived with Mae and Rab; thinking of Rab leads her mind to Duke and the events that followed. When Michael asks about her fear of the dark, she acknowledges that it is connected to something that happened in childhood, but asks to be taken back rather than continue. Later, the memories surface together: her father, Mae’s death, Rab’s death, and the years of abuse that followed Rab’s handover.

Angel repeatedly tries to suppress this history, preferring emotional emptiness to the pain of remembering. Her recollection of Rab therefore does not erase the tenderness of Sarah’s attempt to care for him, but it places that tenderness beside the betrayal that followed. The relationship’s importance lies in that contrast: an early bond of mutual grief and dependence ends not in lasting protection, but in another abandonment that reinforces Angel’s expectation that attachment will become loss.