Danna Olsen

Danna Olsen is Richard Flynn’s partner during the last months of his life and the keeper of the manuscript he wrote about his past. She first enters the investigation as a grieving witness who says she cannot locate the work; only after the case has changed does she admit that she had read it and concealed it. Her eventual choice to send the manuscript to Peter Katz makes her both an intimate witness to Flynn’s final years and the person who decides that his last wish should still be honored.

Identity and Life with Richard Flynn

When Peter Katz visits Flynn’s apartment on East 33rd Street, Danna answers the door and introduces herself. She is in her forties, dressed in a blue housecoat, with dark hair held back by a plastic headband. The small, tidy apartment strikes Katz as arranged more like the home of a single woman than a couple’s shared space. These domestic details frame the life she describes: Danna came from Alabama, met Flynn at a marketing workshop, corresponded with him, and later traveled with him to the Grand Canyon. At Flynn’s insistence, she moved to New York City to live with him.

The move came with personal costs. Danna dislikes the city, and the advertising-agency job she found is below her level of training; she accepted it for Flynn’s sake. She has no relatives in the city and says that if she loses him, she intends to return home. Her account shows a relationship organized around care and accommodation, even as the apartment’s solitary feel hints at the distance that will become important in her later disclosures.

By the time Katz finds her, Flynn has been in All Saints Hospital for five days. He had been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer the previous year and treated with chemotherapy after surgery was ruled out. He had responded positively for a time, but pneumonia contracted two weeks before Katz’s visit brought a sharp decline, and his doctors were not hopeful. Danna cries quietly as she recounts this, then makes tea and asks Katz about the book. She says she did not know that Flynn was writing about his past, a claim that initially positions her as outside the manuscript’s history.

The Missing Manuscript and the Call from Laura

Danna tells Katz that Flynn’s brother and coworkers know about his condition, but she has not been able to read his email because she does not have the password. She does not know where the rest of the manuscript is. Still, she searches the small Lenovo laptop Flynn left behind, checking the desktop and every document file, including files saved under unexpected names. She finds no password-protected documents and suggests that the manuscript might be at his office or on one of several memory sticks. She promises to ask Flynn about it at the hospital and to call Katz with whatever she learns.

Before Katz leaves, Danna describes an argument she overheard several months earlier. Flynn had taken a call in the kitchen, away from her, but returned furious, his hands trembling. He said the caller was an old acquaintance from his time at Princeton, New Jersey, named Laura, who had ruined his life and would pay for it. Danna’s account makes the call a turning point in her understanding of Flynn: she had not known the story behind his anger, and its intensity frightened and puzzled her.

After Flynn’s death, Danna tells Katz that he had been unconscious when she reached the hospital on the day of the visit, sedated and then slipping into a coma, so she never asked him where the manuscript was. She says she also checked the household’s memory sticks and disks without success and planned to examine the belongings sent from his office. She gives Katz the funeral-parlour address, and he attends Flynn’s Friday funeral in a city buried under snow.

Danna later provides a more complicated account of the call. She waited until Flynn was asleep, checked his phone’s call log, and wrote down the number corresponding to the argument. She says she felt ashamed of acting jealously but was alarmed by Flynn’s condition. The next day she called the number, identified herself as his partner, and arranged to meet the woman for lunch at a nearby restaurant. The woman introduced herself as Laura Westlake.

Danna tells Laura that she is worried about Flynn after hearing the argument. Laura reassures her that she and Flynn were old acquaintances from Princeton, New Jersey, and had shared a house for a few months but been no more than friends. Danna does not tell Laura what Flynn said about her. Instead, she claims that Flynn had told her they were lovers, testing Laura’s response; Laura denies it and suggests that Flynn’s imagination or memory may be unreliable. Danna’s account reveals both her anxiety about the relationship and her willingness to shape what she tells Laura in order to probe a past she does not understand.

What Danna Learns from Laura

Laura later explains that Flynn had reappeared at her apartment after more than twenty years without contact. She describes him as agitated and says he threatened revelations connected in some unclear way to Professor Joseph Wieder. She asked him to leave, refused to meet him after he called again, and did not know he was seriously ill. Danna’s earlier encounter with Laura thus sits between two versions of Flynn: the partner whose trembling anger she witnessed and the man Laura remembers as a disturbing, possibly unwell visitor.

When Katz asks Danna whether the caller was Laura Baines, she pauses, leaves the room, and returns with a changed, more formal manner. She asks Katz to promise that his writing will not damage Flynn’s memory, regardless of what his research uncovers. She says that Katz can omit matters concerning Flynn alone, since his interest is in Wieder. Only after Katz agrees to contact her if he discovers anything significant does Danna produce the crumpled slip of paper bearing the phone number she had copied from Flynn’s call log. The number and her demand for discretion show that she is not merely passing along a recollection: she is deciding what evidence to release and on what terms.

Years later, Laura tells Katz that she changed her name to escape Flynn and the memories attached to him. She says he had never been violent, but had harassed her, and that she left for Europe after adopting her mother’s maiden name. Danna’s concern about Flynn’s angry call therefore belongs to a history Laura experienced as persistent unwanted contact, not simply an old disagreement between friends.

Concealment, Grief, and the Manuscript’s Return

For weeks, Katz continues to hear that Danna has found no trace of the remaining chapters. When he speaks to her about the excerpt, she says she tried to find the rest because she wanted to know what happened next, and supposes that Flynn may have erased it. The account appears to close off the search. Katz eventually puts his investigation papers in a box, tells Danna he is dropping the matter, and hears her agree that the dead should rest while the living get on with their lives.

After the case becomes public and Derek Simmons is arrested, Danna calls Katz from Alabama and admits that she lied. She knew where the manuscript was and had read it before Flynn’s death, but had not wanted to give it to Katz or anyone else. Reading it showed her how deeply Flynn had loved Laura Baines. Though he appeared angry with Laura, Danna believed he died still loving her. Danna felt betrayed: she had cared for Flynn, endured his eccentricities, and remained beside him while he spent the final months of his life writing about another woman. Her earlier concealment is thus not explained as simple ignorance or an inability to find files; it was a choice made out of hurt.

That hurt does not have the last word. Danna says Flynn’s final wish was for the manuscript to be published and that, apart from the story involving Baines, he had wanted to become a writer. She now believes it is right to send the work to Katz, although Flynn did not live to see it accepted. She confirms that she still has Katz’s email address and promises to send the manuscript. She also warns that the final chapters bear the mark of Flynn’s difficult last weeks, without explaining their contents.

Narrative Role and Significance

Danna’s story gives the missing manuscript an intimate history beyond its value as evidence. To Katz, it is initially a lost document that might illuminate the past; to Danna, it becomes proof that the man she cared for remained emotionally bound to Laura. Her deception temporarily blocks the investigation, while her later confession changes how the manuscript’s absence is understood: it was not simply misplaced or erased but deliberately withheld by someone wounded by what she had read.

Her actions also complicate the idea of a reliable witness. Danna supplies valuable particulars—the call-log number, the restaurant meeting, and Flynn’s reaction—but her first account omits the most consequential fact about her own knowledge. At the end, however, she chooses disclosure and gives Katz access to the work. The decision does not undo her concealment or resolve the manuscript’s meaning in advance; it restores the possibility that Flynn’s writing can be read, while preserving Danna’s own account of the cost of living beside a man whose final devotion, as she understood it, belonged elsewhere.