Indiana is presented as a place whose geography and laws shape the lives of the characters: the White River helps explain why Indianapolis became the state capital, while Indiana’s rules govern the Pickett estate and the legal status of the missing Russell Pickett. The state’s identity in the novel is therefore practical as well as geographic, linking a river too shallow for navigation to legal systems that can organize wealth and family responsibility without resolving their human uncertainties.

Geography and the State Capital

Daisy Ramirez explains that after Indiana became a state, its founders sought a central location for a new capital. The White River appeared to make a suitable site for shipping, so they chose a place in the middle of the state and named it Indianapolis. Only afterward, in Daisy’s account, did they realize that the river was roughly six inches deep and could not carry even a kayak, much less a steamship. She adds that Indianapolis was for a time the world’s largest city not situated on a navigable waterway. The anecdote makes the river a historical irony: it helped attract the capital’s founders even though it could not perform the transportation function they expected.

Daisy’s account is part of a conversation with Aza Holmes while the two recall playing along the riverbank as children. The contrast between that childhood setting and the history lesson turns the White River into more than scenery: it is a familiar place whose shallow water carries a consequential story about how the state’s central city was chosen.

Indiana Law and the Pickett Estate

Daisy describes researching wills during a work break. As she explains Indiana law, a person cannot leave money directly to a nonhuman animal, but can leave it to a corporation established solely to benefit one. She applies that distinction to the Pickett fortune: the money could go to a company benefiting the tuatara, even though the state does not treat pets as people. The rule makes a legal category—corporate personhood—an instrument for providing for an animal, while also exposing the limits of inheritance rights for the Picketts’ children: according to Daisy, a parent is not required to leave children property or college funds.

Daisy considers what would happen if Russell Pickett went to prison. She says the children would receive a guardian, potentially the house manager or a family member, with funds allocated for their expenses. Her speculation about becoming a guardian of billionaire children if fugitive-finding did not work out as a career extends the conversation from abstract inheritance rules to the practical question of who would care for Davis Pickett and Noah Pickett.

Legal Life and Family Responsibility

The novel distinguishes legal status from the human question of care. When Aza asks who will look after the brothers, a legal representative explains that Davis has been declared an emancipated minor and is Noah’s legal guardian. Aza objects that she is asking about someone who actually cares for Noah, not merely the person named in a legal role. The answer she receives remains procedural: the representative administers the financial affairs, the house manager oversees the home, and Davis serves as guardian. Indiana’s legal framework can assign duties and arrange expenses, but in this exchange it cannot satisfy Aza’s concern about whether the brothers are emotionally cared for.

The same conversation clarifies the state’s rule for declaring a missing person legally dead. The representative says that Indiana law considers an individual alive until biological evidence of death emerges or seven years pass after the last evidence of life. He trusts that Russell Pickett is biologically alive and says Russell is legally alive under that rule. The distinction does not answer Aza’s question about who will care for the boys; instead, it shows how legal certainty can coexist with unresolved personal fears. Indiana thus shapes the story through rules that determine what can happen to an estate and when absence can acquire a formal legal meaning, while leaving the emotional consequences of those rules in view.