Alice

Alice is David Hunter’s daughter, killed in the car crash that also took Kara. Although she appears only in David’s dreams in the supplied scenes, those appearances give his bereavement a vivid family presence: she is not merely remembered as someone lost, but encountered as a child who can speak to and embrace her father. Her eventual absence from his last dream helps mark a change in David’s relationship to grief and to the life still waiting for him.

Identity and Place in David’s Life

The available scenes establish Alice through her bond with David and Kara rather than through an independent biography. In David’s dreams, she remains their daughter: close to both parents, at ease in the familiar domestic world they share, and still able to address David as her father. Nothing in these scenes supplies further facts about her life, so her characterization rests on the intimacy of those family moments and on their contrast with David’s waking loss.

David’s account of his history with Kara and Alice is part of what he shares with Jenny Hammond. Their conversation makes clear that his bereavement is not an isolated memory he has left behind; it remains part of the person he is bringing into a new relationship. Jenny listens and briefly touches his hand. The scene places Alice within David’s continuing life, not as a rival to new attachment but as someone whose loss shapes the emotional circumstances in which he approaches it.

Alice in the Recurring Dreams

The dreams give Alice a stable setting: a house David recognizes as the home inhabited by Kara and Alice in his sleep, though he knows he has never visited it while awake. In one dream, Kara sits with Alice curled on her lap. The familiar household setting and the ordinary closeness between mother and daughter make David’s imagined reunion feel, to him, like a return to family life. His joy at seeing them is so complete that he assumes he is back with them for good; the dream’s emotional force comes from that temporary collapse of the boundary between remembered family and present reality.

Kara then asks Alice to go outside so that she and David can talk. Alice would rather remain with her father, but Kara insists, and Alice comes over to embrace him before leaving. David reassures her that he will be there when she returns. The exchange gives the dream its own small separation: Alice leaves the conversation, but the departure seems temporary to David, who expects their reunion to continue. That expectation makes the later change in the dreams more significant. The scene does not restore the family in waking life; it stages David’s longing for an ordinary, ongoing bond with his daughter.

Absence, Warning, and Change

Alice is not present in every dream. After an exhausting night, David dreams of Kara alone. The dream brings sadness without the renewed intensity of loss he has previously felt, and Kara speaks approvingly of David’s relationship with Jenny. Its significance for Alice lies partly in this absence: the dream’s attention has shifted from the lost family as a whole to the question of whether David can form a life beyond it. Kara’s warning leaves him uneasy, but Alice is not made to deliver that warning or assigned a separate message of her own.

In David’s final dream, both Kara and Alice are gone. The house remains familiar, but its rooms are unoccupied, and David understands that he will not visit them again in sleep. This absence differs from Alice’s temporary departure in the earlier dream: there is no expectation that she will return to the room or to his arms. David accepts that the dreams have served their purpose and that their hold on him has ended. He wakes with tears, but does not treat them as evidence that anything is wrong.

Narrative Significance

Alice’s dream appearances give form to David’s unresolved bereavement without making the dreams a literal return of the dead. The scenes are narrated through David’s experience: the house feels like home, his reunion brings overwhelming happiness, and only gradually does the dream’s meaning turn toward separation. Alice’s presence makes the loss intimate and familial; her absence from the final dream makes David’s movement forward legible without diminishing that love.

The pattern also distinguishes remembering from remaining trapped in memory. At first David’s dream reunion allows him to imagine that he has returned to his family permanently. Later, Kara’s conversation directs his attention toward Jenny, and finally the familiar house stands empty. Alice does not reappear to explain or endorse this change. Instead, the narrative uses the altered contents of David’s dreams to show that he can carry his daughter’s memory without needing to keep entering an imagined home where the family is still together.