51 pages • 1 hour read
Freida McFaddenThe Boyfriend
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 12-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary: “Present Day (Sydney)”
Sydney finds Bonnie’s body badly mutilated and calls the police. The investigating detective is Sydney’s ex-boyfriend, Jake Sousa, the only man she ever loved. Jake reveals that there was no sign of a break-in and that Bonnie’s doctor crush was communicating with her via a burner phone. Sydney encourages him to pursue Kevin as a suspect since Bonnie stood up to him when Kevin approached them on the street. She’s confident Jake can find the murderer since they broke up because of his focus on his job.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Before (Tom)”
Tom volunteers at a health fair with Daisy and Allison. Allison questions him about Brandi Healy, a classmate Tom tutored who disappeared, making him nervous. Daisy assigns Tom a role taking blood samples for diabetes tests. Tom is thrilled to be working with blood, but panics when Daisy offers to let him practice on her first. As he pricks her finger, he imagines all of the blood draining out of her. He tries to hide his reaction.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Present Day (Sydney)”
Gretchen and Sydney drink a bottle of wine and tearfully reminisce about the things they loved about Bonnie. Sydney regrets that she didn’t know more about Bonnie’s boyfriend, wondering if she could have saved her. Gretchen leaves to spend the night with Randy. Alone, Sydney eats a pint of ice cream that Bonnie had brought her the week prior. She searches for Jake Sousa on the Cynch app, and is relieved to see his profile.
Chapter 15 Summary
After reviewing Jake’s profile, she decides to call him. He answers instantly, saying her name, and she feels relieved that he didn’t delete her number. When prodded, Jake reveals that fingerprints found in Bonnie’s apartment match fingerprints found at another crime scene with a young female victim. Like Bonnie, this victim frequently used Cynch to meet men. Both women had large chunks of hair cut out of a specific part of their head. Jake tells Sydney to stay safe.
Chapter 16 Summary: “Before (Tom)”
The sounds of Tom’s mother screaming wake him from a dream in which he slices off Daisy’s hands. His mother’s screams are more urgent than they have been in years, and Tom feels he must intervene. He grabs a fire poker and imagines stabbing his father, but he hesitates and his father takes the poker, turning it on him. Tom agrees to his father’s demands that he never interfere again.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Present Day (Sydney)”
On the ride to Bonnie’s funeral, Randy questions why Gretchen and Sydney are so upset, given they weren’t related to Bonnie. Jake meets Sydney at the church and asks her to report anything strange, claiming perpetrators sometimes attend at their victims’ funerals. Bonnie’s mother questions Sydney about Bonnie’s mystery boyfriend, and chastises her for not knowing his name or ever asking to see a picture of him. As Sydney reels with guilt, Kevin enters.
Chapter 18 Summary
Sydney attempts to get a better look at the man she believes is Kevin as the pallbearers enter with the casket. Sydney struggles to believe that Bonnie is truly dead, and fixates on the casket throughout the ceremony. Sydney thinks about Bonnie using Cynch to find the love of her life, and believes that she was unfairly punished for it. As she tries to prevent a panic attack, Sydney vows not to end up like Bonnie.
Chapter 19 Summary: “Before (Tom)”
The body of Brandi Healy, a student who went missing nearly a year ago, is found near Tom’s school. Slug mentions the fact that Tom tutored Brandi, but Tom insists that he barely knew her. Daisy asks Tom to comfort her while Allison glares at him. Daisy reveals that her father, the chief of police, believes that a student killed Brandi. Tom agrees to walk Daisy home but privately fears he might be arrested by the end of the day.
Chapter 20 Summary
Tom spends the morning worrying that he will be called in for questioning about Brandi’s disappearance. When he’s finally called to the principal’s office, he’s horrified to find Daisy’s father is there. Tom lies and says that Brandi often skipped their tutoring appointments; in reality, she never missed an opportunity to spend time with him. Chief Driscoll reveals that Brandi’s friends claim she planned to meet her crush the night she disappeared. Tom denies knowing anything.
Chapter 21 Summary: “Present Day (Sydney)”
The emotional trauma of the funeral makes Sydney forget about the man she believes to be Kevin. By the time she remembers, he’s gone. Gretchen encourages her to tell Jake about seeing him, but Sydney questions herself and dismisses it. She determines not to let fear get to her, and to follow Jake’s advice to dead bolt her door, confident that Bonnie’s murderer will be caught.
Chapter 22 Summary: “Two Months Later (Sydney)”
After a month of being too afraid to date, Sydney reactivates her Cynch profile. She has a nice date with a man named Travis. Moments after she agrees to extend their coffee date to dinner, the mystery man who saved her from Kevin’s attack enters the coffee shop. Sydney’s nose begins to bleed, causing Travis to faint. The mystery man intervenes, claiming he’s a doctor. After Travis panics and leaves, the doctor asks Sydney out. He does not seem to recognize Sydney from the night of Kevin’s assault. He introduces himself as Tom Brown.
Chapter 23 Summary: “Before (Tom)”
Chief Driscoll returns to the school to question students, but no arrests are made, and Tom is not called in again. In fact, the chief asks Tom to walk Daisy home every day in order to keep her safe, infuriating her best friend Allison, who seems to hate him more than ever. During their biology lab, Allison refuses to help dissect the fetal pig, insisting that Tom should do it because he enjoys it. Tom does not deny enjoying the lab.
Chapter 24 Summary
As the lab ends, Allison demands to speak to Tom privately. Allison reveals that she saw him kissing Brandi a few days before her disappearance and that she believes Tom is the crush Brandi was supposed to meet. Tom denies this, but knows it’s true: He planned to call things off with Brandi because he knew he was in love with Daisy. Allison insists that Tom break up with Daisy, but he refuses. While walking home, Tom and Daisy say that they love each other.
Chapters 12-24 Analysis
This section of The Boyfriend contains the novel’s rising action as McFadden uses a variety of narrative techniques to build suspense. In Chapters 15 through 17, for example, McFadden uses a series of short chapters and cliff hangers to build a tense narrative cadence that reinforces the novel’s menacing tone. In Chapter 15, McFadden reveals that Bonnie was killed by “a serial killer roaming the city targeting young women” (101). When Sydney’s ex-boyfriend Detective Jake Sousa tells her to double-check her lock, she dismisses the warning, insisting that “nobody is going to break into [her] house tonight and murder [her]” (101). In the chapter’s final sentence, however, she relents and “[makes] sure the dead bolt is in place” (102). The chapter’s abrupt ending and the obvious threat of violence to young women in these passages establish an atmosphere of danger surrounding Sydney and emphasizes the novel’s thematic interest in Navigating Misogyny and Safety Risks in the Dating World.
McFadden escalates the threat of violence in the “Before” timeline in Chapter 16, which begins with Tom dreaming of “stabbing or strangling” his girlfriend Daisy and ends with Tom’s father threatening to stab him (103). The violence of the chapter helps to build suspense so that by end of the chapter, the atmosphere of violence established in chapter 16 is fully realized. However, Chapter 17 begins with Sydney safe in a cab in her “fancy funeral attire” (109) on the way to Bonnie’s funeral. This sudden shift in tone is disorienting so that the reader remains in a state of suspense even after Sydney is revealed to be safe. McFadden’s use of cliffhangers across these three short chapters in just nine pages helps to quickly build suspense, reinforce life or death plot stakes, and create a pervasive, menacing tone.
McFadden continues to build the suspense of the thriller by progressively revealing information about Tom Brewer, the high-school protagonist of the “Before” timeline. The systematic revelation of details that connect the Tom of the past to the Tom of the present create dramatic tension around the degree to which Tom’s violent impulses will manifest in his relationship with Sydney. Tom’s dream of slicing Daisy’s arm “cleanly through the bone, severing her right hand” (103) and his fantasy about stabbing “the sharp point of the fire poker through [his father’s] beer belly” (106) suggest that Tom has a specific fixation with stabbing violence. Later, in Chapters 19 and 20, Tom demonstrates a suspicious fear of police. Tom lies about the nature of his relationship with Brandi, telling police that “she skipped a lot of the sessions” when in reality she “never skipped our sessions” (124). By explicitly revealing Tom as a liar in the past, McFadden calls everything he says to Sydney in the present into question.
These chapters contain the first hint of the connection between the two timelines, as the mystery man who rescued Sydney is revealed to be a doctor named Tom Brown. Because Tom Brewer was obsessed with the idea of being a surgeon, McFadden immediately connects the Tom in Sydney’s timeline to the Tom Brewer of the past. The fact that both Brandi and Bonnie were found “tortured” (78, 120) suggests that both women were murdered by the same person, planting the seeds of Daisy/Gretchen as a serial murderer and laying the groundwork for a more direct engagement with Cycles of Violence and Neglect in Families in later chapters.
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By Freida McFadden
