Dannie is the protagonist of this novel. For the bulk of the narrative, Dannie is 32 years old and living in Manhattan, where she works at her dream job as a corporate lawyer. Dannie is an ambitious person whose regimented lifestyle and strict self-discipline are a result both of her nature and of the trauma of her brother’s death when she was 12 years old. As she is the narrator of the novel, Dannie’s perspective is the one through which the reader’s experience is filtered, and Dannie’s past trauma and resulting caution, ambition, and need for control inform the events, feelings, and messages in the text.

The characteristics that at least partially originated in her brother’s death shape Dannie’s values and perspective on the world. Dannie is cautious and averse to risk. The plan she has established for herself requires great discipline and sacrifice and is marked by the motivation of her ambition. She has chosen to be a corporate lawyer, preferring the fact-based and black-and-white text of contract law to the more passionate, spur-of-the moment trial law. Dannie prefers certainty to uncertainty and rarely makes decisions that aren’t informed by her goals and the outcomes she deems most likely.