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52 pages 1 hour read

Laura Dave

The Night We Lost Him

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024

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Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 7Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue Summary

Liam Noone reflects that any biographer tasked with narrating his life would sum him up as a man who wanted to escape his childhood. This is why he began his career by purchasing property on the Central California Coast, as far from Brooklyn as he thought he could go. While making plans to build a hotel near Santa Barbara, he purchased a small craftsman cottage, right on the cliffs of the coastline overlooking the ocean. Rather than tearing it down to build something larger, he kept the small home for more than 30 years. He’d always been afraid to bring his children there, and as he is pushed over the edge of the cliff, his last thought is that it’s “better [him] than them” (4).

Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Open Houses”

Liam’s daughter, Nora, is an architect in Brooklyn. She has just been hired by a 25-year-old woman named Morgan and her fiancé, Sam, to renovate a large brownstone. Nora is instantly irritated by Morgan’s lack of interest in the renovation process and her penchant for pulling out her phone mid-conversation. Morgan’s fiancé happens to be Nora’s brother, although he is the product of Liam’s second marriage. Nora and Liam were not close. Their father has just died, and although Sam wants to discuss the will with Nora, Nora maintains that she does not want any of their father’s money.

Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “You Can’t Pick Your Famil(ies)”

It becomes clear to Nora that Sam hired her mostly so that he could talk to her. She hasn’t seen him in years and has been dodging his calls for weeks. Sam and his twin, Tommy, both work for their father’s real estate company and will take over now that Liam has died. Nora never had any interest in working for their father or in taking his money. Her mother was adamant that Nora be self-made, and Nora obtained a neuroscience and arts bachelor’s degree and an architecture master’s degree. She is proud of her accomplishments and does not resent her brothers for working for their father, but she avoids them all. 

Sam finally corners her during a meeting about the brownstone. He explains that their father changed his will at the last minute, leaving the company entirely to him and Tommy. This does not surprise Nora, but she is surprised to learn that he left his coastal bungalow Windbreak to her. Sam also shares that he believes their father’s death was not an accident as the police had ruled; he believes that he was pushed. He asks Nora to fly to California with him to investigate.

Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “Sheet Music”

Nora scans her father’s will on the way home from her meeting with Sam. As she does so, she reflects on his life. His marriage to her mother ended when his girlfriend became pregnant with Sam and Tommy. He married Sam and Tommy’s mother but divorced and married again. There were no children from his third marriage. He’d maintained contact with all of his previous wives and children but compartmentalized his relationships in a way that created distance with everyone. Nora had never resented him for it, though; she was happy growing up with her mother. The two were closely bonded, and Nora had been heartbroken when her mother was killed while cycling along her usual route about a year ago. After her mother died, Nora withdrew from everyone, even her father. 

Nora stops at Sheet Music on the way home to her Victorian house in Brooklyn. The chef, Jack, is her fiancé. The two met in middle school and then reconnected as adults. Jack is handsome, confident, and caring. She feels a twinge of guilt about being back in touch with her ex-boyfriend, Elliot, but pushes it aside. She tells him that Sam is sure that their father’s death was not an accident and that he wants her to accompany him to California. Jack offers to go along.

Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “An Early Departure”

Sam and Nora head to California to visit Windbreak. The lead investigator on their father’s case, Detective O’Brien, meets them at the cottage. He walks them through his findings. Sam is combative at every turn, and it is left to Nora to smooth things over. However, as the detective explains the contents of his report, Nora’s suspicion mounts, and she, too, becomes more assertive in her conversational style. They learn several disquieting things: Although the police were sure that no one else was on the property, it would have been possible for someone to enter if they’d known the security code. This could potentially implicate someone close to Liam, and the police never investigated it. Also, there were three witnesses to the fall. Two, a couple, reported seeing a man whom they didn’t know. He claimed to be a resident, but the beach is small, and the couple told officers that they walked it every day. Even odder, the man left before the police could arrive and was never interviewed.

Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary: “Most Likely to Succeed”

Nora contemplates her father and his ex-wives: her mother; Sam and Tommy’s mother, Sylvia; and Inez. He’d stayed close with all three women after their marriages ended. Nora admits to herself that she does not quite understand her father or his relationships. Even his bond with his cousin Joe is a mystery to her. She has no idea whether the two men, long-time business associates at Noone, were actually friends or if their relationship dynamics had shifted over time.

Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary: “Fifty-One Years Ago”

The narrative turns to Liam’s youth. Joe has come to live with Liam’s family, and the two boys attend Midwood high school together in Brooklyn. A pretty transfer student named Cory piques both their interests. She meets Joe first, and Liam is sure that the two have already begun dating, but he is also smitten with Cory and does his best to befriend her.

Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary: “Knock Before Entering”

Back in the present, Clark, the property manager, surprises Nora as she looks through Windbreak. He has overseen things at the cottage for decades, and Nora knows him well. He expresses guilt that he had not been alerted to Liam’s presence on the night of his death. Liam always arranged for Clark to open the cottage, and Clark theorizes that he didn’t because he knew Clark was camping with family. As the two talk, it seems as though Clark wants to share something with Nora, but Sam interrupts. He tells Nora that they must leave immediately and asks how much she knows about Cece Salinger, a local hotel magnate.

Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 7 Analysis

Part 1 introduces Nora, the novel’s primary protagonist. The author’s first descriptions of Nora highlight her education and career. Although her father is a wealthy property development mogul with a desire to help his daughter and many connections, Nora chose to pay her own way through architecture school and refused a position working in her father’s large, successful company. This both showcases Nora’s drive, acumen, and individualism and establishes The Search for Identity Within Families as an important theme: The Noone family values career above all else, and both Liam and his children have ended up in fields with ties to real estate. Nonetheless, Nora chose to make her own way because it is important to Nora to differentiate herself from her father and brothers. Although she also derives much of her identity from her work, she does so on her own terms. 

Nora’s interactions with her brother Sam and her memories of Liam establish Fraught Family Relationships as another of the novel’s key themes. Sam and Nora have different mothers but are relatively close in age and work in similar career fields. Despite what they have in common, they do not have a relationship and have not seen each other in several years by the time the novel begins. When Sam hires Nora to design his new home, she accepts the job but has no intention of reconnecting with him, and it is only at his urging that she agrees to talk about their father. Although the author explores it more fully in subsequent sections of the novel, their lack of connection is rooted in their father’s lack of emotional connectivity. In these early chapters, Nora recalls how little time she spent with Liam growing up and is still noticeably hurt that he was still emotionally distant when he was around. There is the definite sense that both Sam and Nora felt the sting of Liam’s aloofness and that, even though it wounded them, they themselves reproduce his troubled behavioral patterns.

Liam, although deceased, looms large over this first section of the novel. In addition to exploring the way that his parenting impacted his children, the author also begins to add depth and detail to his characterization. Liam was self-made and successful in his field, but Nora acknowledges his intractability in many of her memories of him. In a conversation with Sam, the two reminisce about Liam: 

‘Do you remember our father?’ he says. It’s a joke and it’s not. Even staying far removed from my father’s business affairs, I knew enough to know that he had a particular way of doing things which made him respected by some but dislike by others, personally and professionally. His supporters called him exacting, his critics exhausting (19). 

Here, they acknowledge that Liam was just as difficult to deal with in his professional relationships as he was in his personal ones and admit that they were not the only individuals to struggle in their interactions with him.

Wealth emerges as a key motif in this set of chapters, as both Liam’s and Sam’s affluence are on display. The author does not share many details about Liam’s childhood, but she does clarify that Liam’s career was always driven by his desire to achieve enough material success that he would never have to return to Brooklyn or live the way his family did. Liam was not avaricious, and he did enjoy work for its own sake, but he was markedly oriented toward achievement and passed this quality on to his sons. Sam is introduced partially through his work for Noone Properties and partially through the lens of wealth: He hires Nora to help design a large and costly home, and it is evident from their conversations that he is comfortable spending large sums of money. 

Other key motifs such as real estate and architecture emerge in Part 1. All the characters in this novel are involved in the worlds of real estate, property development, and architecture. These fields and the career drive that propelled Liam, his business partners, and his children toward success are central aspects of characterization in this novel, but they are also part of the author’s exploration of The Search for Identity Within Families. Each of the characters places high importance on their career, but each approaches their work in slightly different ways. Liam’s career choices reflect his desire for success and independence. His sons share his interest in material success and additionally have made career choices that allowed them to be closer to their father. Nora, although she also values work, is more interested in the creative aspect of architecture than she is in status, and she wants to differentiate herself from her family rather than identify with it.

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