Boston is a city of uneasy beginnings and departures in the novel: Nella Rogers goes there after Harvard but never learns to love it, Hazel-May McCall leaves it for New York, and Shani Edmonds’s career at Cooper’s Magazine ends there in a public firing. The city’s cold and quiet are contrasted with New York’s energy, but its more lasting significance lies in the professional pressures and racial hostility that make leaving feel necessary for more than one character.

Setting and Contrast

Boston enters the story through competing impressions. Vera Parini calls it a great college town, while Hazel describes it as quieter and colder than New York and says she missed New York’s energy. The comparison is not only about weather or pace: for characters moving between the cities, Boston is associated with work and attempted belonging, while New York represents return, reinvention, or a chance to act on new knowledge.

The city’s cold also becomes part of Shani’s practical history. After discovering how unforgiving Boston winters could be, she bought Sperry boots, which she later remembers while retrieving a stained card left by Lynn Johnson. That card bears a warning that Lynn is resisting. The detail places Shani’s encounter with the Resistance amid ordinary traces of life in Boston, before she understands the warning’s significance.

Nella’s Difficult Fit

Nella’s relationship with Boston follows her time at Harvard. She remembers leaving for college with uncertainty about what she would do there, then missing New Jersey and trying, unsuccessfully, to love Boston. In the same recollection, she says that she was pulled deeper into books and further away from white people. The city is therefore part of a personal history in which education and literary life develop alongside increasing distance from the people and social world around her.

That history informs Nella’s view of Hazel’s account of the city. When Hazel says she lived in Boston for two years and worked at a small magazine before returning to New York, Nella suspects that racism may also have driven her away. Hazel does not say this in their conversation. Nella imagines the kinds of workplace reprimands Hazel might have faced over her locs or eyebrow piercing, but the narrative presents these as Nella’s conjectures, not confirmed incidents. Hazel’s furrowed brow and small gold stud prompt the speculation; they do not establish what happened at her former job.

Nella also considers Boston when judging how Hazel might respond to white colleagues. Because Hazel had spent several years working with white people there, Nella initially expects her to recognize the limits of Vera’s kindness and to share Nella’s skepticism. Yet she remembers Vera welcoming Hazel warmly and being kind in private. Boston thus becomes part of Nella’s attempt to interpret Hazel’s experience, though it does not settle whether Nella’s assumptions about either woman are right.

Hazel’s Departure

Hazel tells her new colleagues that she lived in Boston for two years, worked at a small magazine, and returned to New York a few months earlier. She says she likes New York too much to stay away and wants to return to the nonprofit she had started in the Harlem community. Her explanation emphasizes attachment to New York and a prior commitment there; she does not identify the Boston workplace as the reason for leaving.

Later, Hazel’s history in Boston takes on a more troubling dimension. She tells Nella that she, too, was an Involuntary and that she was pulled out of Boston and assigned to Nella. Hazel frames the assignment as a consequence of perceived similarities between them: both wanted to get along, and Nella had endured public criticism without cracking. This revelation recasts Hazel’s move from Boston. It was not simply a personal return to New York; it was also part of an intervention that placed her in Nella’s life and workplace.

Shani’s Firing and Exit

For Shani, Boston is the site of a professional promise that collapses. At Cooper’s Magazine she had worked hard on a story, but after an article was circulated, her boss reprimanded and fired her in front of her colleagues. The public dismissal ends both her employment at the magazine and her chance to complete the story as she had planned it.

Shani later connects that ending to Eva. She recalls that Eva secretly emailed the article to everyone at Cooper’s while Shani was on an important phone call, leaving Shani unaware of what had reached her boss before she was called into the office and told to pack her things. Shani remembers trying to defend the unfinished feature by pointing to four people in public housing who had agreed to speak with her and to the magazine’s plan to position the piece as its February feature. Her account makes the firing not merely a lost job, but the abrupt destruction of work she believed the magazine still needed.

Afterward, Shani texts Lynn on her way home and accepts the Resistance’s account, including its lists, charts, and promise of further information in New York. She takes a bus ticket connected to an interview at a modest Manhattan café, where she is to sweep floors. To follow the Resistance’s instruction to stay off the grid, she deletes her social-media accounts and cuts off years of hair. She tells her mother that she left Boston because of an unspeakably racist experience at work and wants to start over, while withholding the fuller explanation. Her mother does not press her, and Shani’s aunt picks her up at Penn Station without asking about her shaved head.

Boston in Retrospect

By October 20, 2018, Shani is in New York, approaching Broadway and considering whether to leave rather than risk becoming involved. She thinks that without her job at Cooper’s, she would have shut herself away in her Boston apartment with a bottle of Jack and a bowl of Reese’s Puffs. The memory conveys how much the job had mattered to her even as the magazine ultimately failed her. It also clarifies what is at stake in her decision to remain: after meeting Kendra Rae Phillips and seeing her pleading expression, Shani cannot simply return to the isolation she associates with Boston.

Boston consequently holds several meanings without resolving into a single one. It is a college town and a colder, quieter counterpart to New York; a place where Nella’s education coincides with alienation; the former home and workplace from which Hazel is reassigned; and the city Shani leaves after betrayal at Cooper’s. These distinct histories make Boston less a passive backdrop than a recurring measure of whether a character can endure, belong, or begin again.