Tom
Claire's husband. An architect who writes letters he never sends.
Tom is an architect and one of the book's three narrators. He has been married to Claire for eleven years and has never once left the house without his wedding ring. He has worked as an architect for twenty years, out of a converted three-story Victorian on the edge of the business district.
When Quinn walks into the welcome party, Tom goes still. Later that night he unlocks the bottom drawer of his old desk with a small brass key and writes a letter to a woman named Sarah. It is his forty-fourth.
What we learn early
- His study is the one room in the house Claire leaves alone. His desk is older than the house and came from his old apartment.
- He keeps his letters to Sarah in a wooden box in a locked drawer. The brass key rides on his key ring between the car key and the house key.
- He takes "the long way" to work through the older part of town when he needs to think.
- He is working on the Henderson project, for a family company that wants its new building to feel like its old brick one.
Spoilers ahead
The rest of this page covers the whole book, ending included.
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Tom and Sarah
Before Claire, Tom was with Sarah. Claire first saw him across a gallery room. In the months that followed, he watched Claire turn people against Sarah and helped it along. When Claire asked him in October whether Sarah had seemed like herself lately, he said no, knowing where the answer would go. In February, Sarah called him eighteen times in three days and left eleven messages. He listened to every one the day it came and never called back. He let the phone ask him to save them until it stopped asking.
What he does in the book
- He works out that Quinn is Sarah's sister, the girl Sarah called Beth, and hides it from Claire's "sister" test (Chapters 12 and 14).
- He goes to number seven and tells Quinn he won't stand in her way (Chapter 16).
- He writes his forty-eighth and final letter, a goodbye, and seals it (Chapter 19).
- He finds the box empty (Chapter 25), says nothing to Claire, and invites Quinn to dinner on the night of the committee dinner.
- Quinn finds the house drawing he made the year Sarah died, with a sealed letter inside written the day before he married Claire.
- He tells Quinn the truth about the eleven messages (Chapter 30).
Where he ends up
On a Saturday morning in December, Tom takes the brass key off his ring, hangs it alone on the hook, packs one bag, and drives away in full daylight. By spring he is living in a rented apartment in the city with his desk and his drawings. He hasn't spoken to anyone on the street since.