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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text's major themes.
Surveillance
Characters continually endure the weight of surveillance, and the feelings it causes (real and imagined) motivate much of the novel’s action. Surveillance takes many forms across the book. Owen’s work at The Shop involves online privacy technology that will protect people from digital surveillance. In his past life as Ethan, he also worked to thwart surveillance, first by developing software for his father-in-law and then by abandoning his identity to protect himself and his daughter. When Grady visits Hannah, the fact he tracked her via her regular coffee order unsettles her. This practice is standard in law enforcement but is also part of what it means to live in a community. The weight of her neighbors’ staring eyes in the wake of Owen’s disappearance bothers her and becomes another form of surveillance. These forms of surveillance all ultimately feel oppressive because they accompany judgment, potential punishment, and the destruction of the illusion of privacy.
Characters attempt to thwart oppressive forms of surveillance because they threaten both freedom of choice and freedom itself. Hannah perceives a trip to Austin as a way to escape surveillance at home in California. Still, she uses Jules’s credit card as a means of shielding her activities, and her fears about surveillance increase in Texas, with good reason. The final chapter shows Hannah as doubly surveilled. Owen lovingly practices his own form of surveillance to stay close to his family, and Nicholas’s former business partners continue to track her for any sign of her husband. Unlike the other forms of surveillance in the book, Hannah welcomes Owen’s surveillance of his family because it stems from a place of love. He wants to be as close to them as he can while still keeping them safe. Hannah does not resent his surveillance because it does not feel oppressive or harmful to her.
Codes
Hannah and Bailey must crack codes, both literal and metaphorical, to uncover Owen’s secrets. He spends his days working as chief coder at The Shop, so his interest in and experience with codes is a key feature of his personality. Before Katherine’s death, Owen (then Ethan) had used his expertise to help Nicholas encrypt messages for the criminal organization. So not only is his personality a code that the women will have to crack—is he the good man they thought they knew or not?—but he also leaves hidden and coded messages for them. His will contains a coded reference to the piggy bank that stores his second, and final, will. When Owen reaches out to Bailey for the final time, he does so via Signal, an encryption app he had told her to install on her phone. Indeed, when Hannah snoops through his laptop, she finds many encrypted work documents that she cannot understand.
The motif of codes expands beyond the literal codes Hannah and Bailey encounter during their investigation. They also must read between the lines of what others are saying to decipher the real meaning. Hannah and Bailey must also extract meaning from memories that seem unrelated to their task or at odds with what they think they know. In the same way, readers must also decipher the information the novel presents them, as they grapple alongside Hannah in deciding whether she can trust her memories. Hannah’s work as a woodturner also involves its own innate code. As she explains, the first lesson she learned about woodturning involves being able to see what is in the piece of wood before transforming it into something else.
Home
Hannah’s complicated sense of home as a point of safety recurs repeatedly. The novel distinguishes between a physical house and a home, pointing out that they are not necessarily the same. She moves to California for Owen’s sake but does not really consider the houseboat they share with Bailey her home, nor does Sausalito feel like a hometown. The one place Hannah feels at home in Sausalito is her workshop. There she can be herself without tiptoeing around Bailey’s feelings. While in Austin, Hannah thinks about how for her home is more a feeling than a place. That feeling—comfort—comes from Owen. He is her home, which is why her happiest memories of the houseboat involve him and their shared time together. Even in the oasis her workshop offers, her memories often revolve around Owen being there with her rather than the specific work she performs. Nicholas’s imposing house unsettles her, seeming to be more a fortress than a home. At the novel’s end, Hannah returns home to the houseboat with Bailey but without Owen.
