Melanie and Neil

Melanie and Neil are the proprietors of The Clothes Hound, a used clothing store in Toronto, and the adoptive parents of Daisy, who is later revealed to be Baby Nicole. Their murder by a car bomb, orchestrated by Gilead's Eyes, is the inciting event that forces Daisy to learn her true identity and ultimately agree to infiltrate Gilead as a Mayday operative.

Identity and Background

Melanie and Neil ran The Clothes Hound, a store on Queen West that sold "previously loved" clothing. Melanie, who inherited the store from her grandmother, worked the main floor in bright colors and sang old musical tunes while sorting stock. Neil handled the finances from a cluttered second-floor office filled with his collections of wind-up music boxes, clocks, and antique cameras. Their house was a very ordinary yellow-brick building with nothing to make anyone look twice—a detail Daisy later guessed was intentional. They were not Daisy's biological parents; she was placed with them for safekeeping as an infant. Both were highly valued and experienced members of Mayday, the Gilead resistance network. Melanie also worked with SanctuCare, the Gilead refugee organization, and Neil was involved in a different way. They were atheists, as Neil stated, and they sent Daisy to the Wyle School, a private school that took strict attendance, which allowed them to always know where she was.

Life with Daisy

Daisy loved The Clothes Hound as a child, describing it as a cave full of treasures. She was allowed to help in the store on weekends, sorting T-shirts and watching the customers. Melanie and Neil were careful around Daisy, as if she were breakable, and they never took pictures of her—a fact that puzzled her. Melanie told her that all the early pictures had been burnt up in a fire. They were also very protective, forbidding her from going to a protest march about Gilead because it would be on the news and she might be seen. When Daisy sneaked onto the bus anyway and appeared on television, they became anxious and began making plans to move. Melanie called Ada to arrange a van, and Neil said there was no fallback ready. The night before the murder, they held a meeting at their house with people Daisy did not see.

The Break-In and the Murder

Three days after the protest, there was a break-in at The Clothes Hound. The burglars trashed Neil's office, scattered his files, and took some of his collectibles, including a rare antique camera. Neil and Melanie became increasingly jittery after this. Neil ordered a new alarm system, and Melanie mentioned they might move to a different house. The night after the break-in, they watched the news about a dead Pearl Girl, Aunt Adrianna, found tied to a doorknob. Neil said, "This is terrible," and Melanie looked desolate. On Daisy's sixteenth birthday, a car bomb exploded outside The Clothes Hound, killing both Melanie and Neil. George, a street person who frequented the store, later told Ada that he had seen three men in suits walk Melanie and Neil to their car, where they slumped as if asleep or dead, before the car blew up. The bomb was the work of Gilead's Eyes, who had identified Melanie and Neil as Mayday operatives.

Significance

Melanie and Neil's death is the catalyst for the entire plot of Nicole's narrative. It forces Daisy to confront her true identity as Baby Nicole and to agree to the dangerous mission of infiltrating Gilead. Their murder also demonstrates the reach and ruthlessness of Gilead's intelligence operations, even within Canada. The Clothes Hound itself was a key node in the Mayday communication network, using the Pearl Girls' brochures as a courier system for microdots. Neil's microdot camera, which was stolen in the break-in, was the means by which information was exchanged between Mayday and their source inside Gilead. The loss of Melanie and Neil severed this link, making Nicole's mission to retrieve the document cache from the source all the more critical.