The Night We Lost Him

“I zero in on the photograph. My father looks strong, intense, and virile against the mountainscape backdrop. I’m not surprised that this is the photograph the newspaper used.”

Liam defined himself in large part by his career success and prominent position within the real estate industry. He liked to project an image of strength, capability, and confidence, and his sons inherited his interest in having a carefully managed image. However, Nora is critical of this curated presentation of her father, as it represents how little she knew him in their personal life.

“For me, a project always starts with a central image, something that identifies what a space or a property can most organically be.”

This passage helps characterize Nora and differentiates her from her father and brothers. While the Noone men are driven by ego, the desire to succeed, and profit, Nora is motivated by a deep and abiding love for architecture and design. For her, work is about creativity, focus, and the marriage of form and function. She cares about the finished product and about bringing a space to life much more than she cares about money or status.

“My father was fiercely loyal to Joe in all ways. From my vantage point, my father and uncle Joe had that loyalty in common.”

Joe and Liam were fiercely bonded. Their friendship is a key part of each man’s characterization; however, there is much about their history that Liam’s children do not know. Eventually, it becomes clear that Liam and Joe had some weighty secrets, and the task of uncovering them becomes a way for Sam and Nora to better understand both their own family and themselves.

“I am not going to excavate the past with you.”

Nora is initially unwilling to do any digging into her father’s death. This is not because she does not want to know the truth, but rather because of her family’s dysfunction and long history of secrecy and obfuscation. Nora has made a life for herself away from both her father and brothers and feels that her happiness is predicated upon that distance. The emotional walls between herself and the other Noones both characterize her and parallel her to her father and brothers: They, too, maintain emotional distance between themselves and their loved ones.

“He watched her retreating, the angles of her hair and her back still within reach. Let her go. Let her go.”

Liam’s love for Cory underpins many of his actions and is one of the most important aspects of his characterization. Although he marries multiple times and has several families, Liam remains in love with Cory for much of his life; contrary to his hopes here, he can never “let her go.” Their relationship becomes the biggest of his secrets, and unraveling the truth about their father and Cory becomes a fixation for all his children.

“Our father was wired for problem-solving, that’s what made him so good at his job.”

Although it manifests in different ways for each individual, all the members of Liam’s family define themselves largely through their roles at work and their professional success. Liam set the tone for this kind of identification, as he shaped his entire life around the world of real estate. Here, Nora recalls their father’s ability to solve difficult and complex problems and reflects on how that skill underpinned his work in real estate development. This is presented as ironic, as he is unable to solve the complex interpersonal problems in his life.

“Why are there so many secrets in this family?”

Nora explains her lack of a relationship with her brothers and her fraught relationship with Liam by illustrating how the family’s interest in wealth contrasts with her own desire to be self-reliant and focus on the creative aspects of her career. However, secrecy and obfuscation are arguably part of that distance as well. It is only as the narrative unfolds that Nora admits to the role that secrets have played in damaging the Noone family dynamics, and Sam ultimately comes to agree with her.

“All roads lead to Cece, huh?”

Here, Nora and Sam once again meet someone who knows more about Cece’s relationship with their father than they do. One of the narrative’s themes involves an in-depth examination of The Impact of Secrets on families, and secrets are the foundation of the distance that Liam’s children felt from him as a father. Meanwhile, Cece is at the heart of this novel’s mystery, and her being privy to their father’s private life in a way they aren’t is a source of ire for the children.

“If I’ve learned anything, it’s that you don’t need a reason for champagne.”

This line, spoken by Liam, is part of the author’s use of wealth as a motif. Here, Liam brings an expensive bottle of champagne to his daughter’s home for no particular reason, showcasing the ease with which he spends money. Although all the characters in this novel are affluent, wealth does not bring them happiness and, in fact, is part of the complex constellation of factors that render them a fractured and unhappy family.

“My father’s pride in me, in all of us, was immovable even when we weren’t in the room with him.”

The Noone familial relationships are complex. Although they are in many ways a dysfunctional family, there are still ties that bind them to one another. Liam would have preferred Nora to have chosen a career within the family business, and he would have happily supported her financially throughout her schooling. Despite these differences in opinion and values, he remained proud of the success she had achieved.

“Sam holds Tommy’s eyes, and I see it pass between them: this mix of anger and love and resentment, this quiet understanding that the two of them are always in it together and somehow, like now, the opposite of that.”

Fraught Family Dynamics are a key feature of this novel, and each character is shown to have multiple complex relationships. Both Sam and Tommy struggled at points in their relationships with Liam, but there is also animosity between the two. They are both career driven, but Tommy is truly dedicated to his career, whereas Sam would like to do something else. Nora has separated herself from all of them, so she is intrigued by the dissonant combination of support and dislike between her brothers.

“We don’t always make the best decisions when we’re grieving.”

The impact of grief and loss is an important undercurrent in this narrative. Although attuned to fraught family dynamics and the way that dysfunction shapes familial relationships, the novel also explores how loss re-shapes families, particularly for adult children who lose their parents. Each of the siblings handles the loss of their father (and the loss of her mother, in Nora’s case) in different ways; nonetheless, Nora, Sam, and Tommy experience a large-scale emotional recalibration after Liam dies.

“What do you want, Nora? Honestly. Because I want you to have whatever it is.”

Nora’s fiancé, Jack, tells Nora that he intends to give her space and help a friend open a restaurant in California. Their relationship is rocky, as are Liam’s other children’s relationships. One of the primary ways that Noone family dysfunction impacts Liam’s children is their struggles with romantic connection. Each sibling grapples with their desire for love as it butts up against their tendency to compartmentalize and emotionally withdraw from their partnerships, which is inherited from Liam.

“This is how things had been between them recently: Liam reaching for Cory, Cory mostly humoring him.”

Liam and Cory have a complex relationship that is, arguably, only partially functional. Their maintained contact while married to other people impacts each of them profoundly and comes in the way of their marriages. Cory has the upper hand throughout much of their lives, as it’s been Liam who has struggled to move on since she initiated their breakup as teenagers. Liam realizes this here, observing that he pursues Cory much more than she pursues him.

“LSN, In case I don’t say it later, they’re all for you.”

Cory wrote this note to Liam about her writing in their high school’s literary journal. Cory is a complex character whose choices and motivations are not always clear, but moments like this illustrate the depth of her love for Liam. Even though Cory refuses to marry Liam, she is closely bonded with him. In part because she knows that Liam will always value work over family, Cory chooses to be part of his work world rather than his family structure. Their relationship is unconventional and causes pain to many people, but for the two of them, it’s worth the effort.

“What do you see when you look over your shoulder as they’re walking away from you? Their eyes back on each other, your father’s hand slipping onto her hip as if it belonged there because, apparently, it always did.”

Here, Nora has discovered that her father’s long-lost love, Cory, is none other than his business associate Grace, a woman whom she’d known her entire life. She realizes that there were always signs that her father and Grace were involved, but she missed them because her attention was directed elsewhere. She realizes that there is much more to her family than meets the eye. Tommy recently pointed out to her that there was much about her father that she didn’t know, but she wrote him off. She understands in this moment that families are torn apart by forces other than secrets: Sometimes children are blind to who their parents really are because they do not pay enough attention.

“My heartbroken father was attached to Elliot in part because he was helping Grace.”

The web of secrets at the heart of the Noone family is much more complex than Nora originally suspected. Her ex-boyfriend, Elliot, was Grace’s cardiologist, and he knew much more about Liam’s relationship with her than Nora did. This is only one example of many, but it illustrates the way that secrets come between people and family networks. Nora is upset that both her father and her ex kept information from her and feels even more alienated from the Noone clan than she did before.

“It wasn’t my story to tell.”

Joe tries to explain to Sam and Nora why he was unwilling to tell them the truth about their father when they asked directly. Loyalty is a trait that Liam and Joe share, and Joe is loyal to Liam even after his death. Although this fact upsets both Nora and Sam, it is entirely within character for Joe, and they realize that his behavior is understandable.

“Grace was a storyteller. She understood how to generate the message, she probably understood it better than your father.”

Here, Joe tells Nora and Sam about Grace’s early days at the company. Liam brought her on right after he bought it and used her ability to tell stories to the company’s advantage. In doing so, he helped her find a new career that would make use of everything she held dear but had to give up when she quit graduate school in order to care for her mother. Joe thus helps Sam and Nora better understand not only their father’s generosity and love for Grace but also Grace’s own difficult history.

“I built the company with you, and its only because of you that it’s become what it has.”

Nora and her siblings have long characterized their father as an emotionally absent career man who cares much more about work than family. When they finally understand who Grace is and what she meant to Liam, their view of him changes. They realize that the company meant much more. It was a point of connection to the only woman he had ever truly loved. For him, work was actually about love and family all along.

“We know it was you, Paul.”

Although this novel focuses largely on its inquiry into family secrets and family relationships, The Night We Lost Him is also a tightly plotted literary thriller. Plot twists and dramatic moments of revelation are central to the genre, and here the author unveils the second of her two big plot twists. The first is that Cory and Grace are the same person; the second is that Grace’s husband is Liam’s killer. The author’s insight into human nature further complicates the plot twists, however, as Paul did not mean to kill Liam. Knowing how much her father’s relationship hurt Paul, Nora forgives him.

“What does it mean to be faithful if you love someone else anyway? Loyalty doesn’t trump love, not in the end.”

Fraught relationships are central to this novel, and the author provides many examples. Paul explains here that he knew all along that Grace loved Liam more than him, but he thought that he could make things work anyway. Paul and Grace, Liam and Grace, Liam and his wives, and ultimately Liam and his children become examples of strained relationships, and they were all strained because of secrets. The way that secrets impact love and relationships is key to the narrative’s thematic development and helps the author explore the complexity of human interaction with nuance.

“As tempting as it is to be wife number four, I have no desire to marry you, my darling.”

Grace is a complex character. Although her love for Liam is deep and life-long, she always refuses to marry him. She feels that she knows him well enough to know that he is unhappy in traditional relationships and that he would become unhappy even with her. She is willing to maintain their unorthodox connection in order to remain with him, if only in part.