Chapter 7 Summary and Analysis

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.

Summary

Chapter 7 opens with Gwendy Peterson reflecting on the three times the button box has entered her life. The first time, it arrived in a canvas bag with a drawstring top during her adolescence. The second time, she discovered it in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet in her Washington, D.C., office while serving her freshman term as Maine's second district representative. The third time, it came in 2019, during her Senate campaign—a race that Democratic insiders believed had as much chance of succeeding as the Charge of the Light Brigade. Each time, the box was delivered by Richard Farris, a man who always wore jeans, a white shirt, a black suitcoat, and a small bowler hat. On the first occasion, Gwendy kept the box throughout her teenage years. On the second, her custodianship was much shorter, but she believed it saved her mother's life—Alicia Peterson died in 2015, years after cancer should have killed her. The third time, however, was different, and Farris was different too.

Gwendy retired from the House of Representatives in 2012, even though she could have continued winning elections well into her eighties or nineties. Pete Riley, head of the Maine Democratic Committee, once compared her to Strom Thurmond, a comparison she rejected, and then to John Lewis or Margaret Chase Smith. The point was that she was a political