Duncan

Duncan is a student at Millie Calloway’s disciplinary boarding school whose assault on Kelsey prompts Millie to kill him. He is remembered as a large football player and, in Millie’s recollection, as the drunk, laughing attacker in a dark bedroom. His death becomes the defining event behind Millie’s imprisonment, while the loss of Kelsey’s friendship complicates any simple account of the act as rescue.

Identity and the Boarding-School Killing

Duncan is a classmate at the school Millie attends after getting into trouble as a teenager. One night, Millie and Kelsey sneak out to a party in the boys’ dormitory. Passing a bedroom, Millie hears Kelsey crying for help and enters to find Duncan forcing himself on her. He is described as a roughly two-hundred-pound football player, much larger than either girl; Millie recalls that he is laughing drunkenly as Kelsey struggles. In the darkness, Millie cannot simply pull him away. She feels across a desk, finds a paperweight, and strikes him with it repeatedly. He dies before reaching the hospital.

The account of Duncan’s death makes both the urgency of Millie’s intervention and its lethal result impossible to separate. The photographs shown to the detective depict his skull visibly crushed, evidence that made it difficult to argue Millie had not meant to kill him. Her attorney argued that she was defending Kelsey from an assault, but Millie ultimately pleaded guilty to a lesser manslaughter charge. Her age and the circumstances were part of the resolution; Duncan’s family agreed to the plea, seeking vengeance for his death while also wishing to avoid having him identified as a rapist across the internet. Millie accepted the deal in part because other incidents might have emerged at trial.

Duncan’s death does not bring Millie the lasting gratitude or closeness she might have expected from saving Kelsey. Years later, Millie remembers Kelsey looking at her with disgust and never speaking to her again. Millie cannot understand why her friend rejected her after she intervened, but the rupture follows her into adulthood alongside the prison sentence. Her recollection holds two consequences together: she stopped Duncan’s assault, and the act that she felt had been worth the years in prison also cost her the friendship she was trying to protect.

The Memory and Its Afterlife

Duncan’s death returns not as a detached account of Millie Calloway’s past but as a memory that shapes her response when Andrew Winchester confines her. Faced with Andrew demanding release from behind a door, Millie recalls the dark bedroom, Kelsey’s screams, and her own moment of paralysis before she found the paperweight. The memory makes the present confrontation echo the earlier one: a larger man’s demand and a woman’s danger bring back the act Millie once used to stop an assault.

Millie remembers the killing as satisfying in the moment and says it was almost worth the years she spent in prison, because she cannot know how many other girls Duncan might have harmed. Yet that private conviction sits beside the social cost she has already described: Kelsey never spoke to her again, and others had failed to believe Millie when she tried to explain earlier abuse. Duncan therefore remains significant in the narrative not only as the victim of a lethal intervention, but as the point where Millie’s effort to protect another person became a criminal record, estrangement, and a lasting measure of what she believes she may have to do when nobody else will act.

Reputation and the Record of His Death

Before the circumstances of Duncan’s death are known, Nina Winchester assumes Millie Calloway had gone to prison for theft or drugs. Learning that Millie was imprisoned for killing a classmate instead changes the meaning of the record attached to her: the case began when she was only sixteen, and she was in prison by seventeen. Because of her age, the detective has difficulty obtaining the information. Duncan thus enters the story through a revelation about Millie, first as the stark label of murder and then through the circumstances that complicate it.

The distinction between that label and the eventual legal outcome matters. Millie pleads guilty to a lesser manslaughter charge, while the photographs of Duncan’s crushed skull make it difficult to argue that she did not intend to kill him. Her attorney’s defense—that she was protecting Kelsey from an assault—does not erase the force of the evidence or the consequences of the death. Duncan’s place in the narrative rests in that unresolved space between an act of protection and a killing prosecuted by the courts: his death explains Millie’s sentence, but the fuller account prevents her criminal history from standing as the only account of what happened.

The Limits of His Portrayal

Duncan is characterized through the assault, Millie Calloway’s intervention, and the aftermath rather than through a life outside that episode. The narrative gives his physical presence and conduct in the bedroom—his size, drunken laughter, and attack on Kelsey—while the public record emphasizes the fatal injuries and the legal dispute over Millie’s intent. These accounts leave little room for a broader portrait of him, but make the consequences of his actions and death central to how Millie’s past is understood.

The family’s position sharpens that tension: they wanted vengeance for Duncan’s death but also wished to avoid the lasting public identification of him as a rapist. The plea agreement therefore settles the criminal charge without making the competing accounts of the bedroom disappear. Duncan remains at the center of a conflict over what can be made public, what can be proved, and how a lethal act of intervention is remembered.