Chapter 16: Summary, Analysis, and Key Themes
⚠️ 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 16 opens with Jess arriving late to the hospital in Sydney on December 11, 2018. She has spent the taxi ride absorbed in Daniel Miller's book about the Turner family, searching her phone for images of the Adelaide Hills. The landscape Miller describes—silver-trunked gums, hidden watercourses, corrugated-iron roofs—feels strangely familiar to Jess, even though she has never traveled west of the Blue Mountains. She experiences a disquieting sensation: the world of Isabel and Thomas Turner, Mr. Drumming, Mrs. Pike, Betty Diamond, and Meg Summers feels like something she has lived through rather than merely read about. Jess reflects that this is the magic of reading, but her connection to Tambilla goes beyond the usual. She feels an almost hungry need to possess the place, as if she has a right to it.
As the taxi passes through Bondi Junction, Jess studies the 1955 holiday snapshot of Isabel Turner saved on her phone. She thinks about Isabel as a transplant to a different country—someone who belonged but never fully, while another place far away maintained a stubborn claim as home. Jess understands this feeling of displacement. She also recalls reading online that the coroner suppressed testimony given at the inquiry, and she suspects that whatever led him to find Isabel culpable for her children's deaths lies within that suppressed evidence.
When Jess finally reaches the hospital, she discovers she has missed forty-five minutes of visiting time. A nurse named Aimee tells her that Nora is unsettled and has been given something to help her sleep. Aimee encourages Jess to speak to her grandmother anyway, assuring her that Nora can likely hear her and that filling the room with loved ones' voices is better than reverent silence.
Jess tentatively speaks to the sleeping Nora, mentioning that she has been thinking about Isabel, then Issy, then the book As If They Were Asleep, and finally Thomas. Nora shows no reaction. Jess realizes, with a jolt, that what Nora had been saying the previous day was not