“You can’t turn around once you’re in the tunnel. There’s no U-turn, no off-ramp. You’re literally stuck under the East River. This face exhilarated me as a kid. Next stop, Long Island. At the first sight of sunlight at the end of the tunnel, I felt the city melt away. I cracked the window, popped a juice box, kicked off my shoes, and stretched my legs across the backseat. As an adult, entering the Midtown Tunnel makes me feel sort of trapped.”

Annabel Monaghan uses the Midtown Tunnel setting as a metaphor for Sam’s altered relationship with Long Island. In the past, the tunnel felt like a channel to liberation. In the present, Sam feels stifled and claustrophobic while driving through it. The setting mirrors Sam’s internal experience and reveals the ways in which she uses physical settings as markers of her personal history over the course of the novel.

“In the drawer of the desk is a sketch pad that contains early versions of the drawing I did of Wyatt. I don’t need to take it out; I see them perfectly in my mind. It was a super-alive summer, when all of my senses were on a delicious high alert. It was the summer I noticed everything—the way the salt dried on my skin, the way sand settled between my toes. The way Wyatt smiled at me while he was composing a song. We hung the final version of my drawing on a rusty nail on the treehouse wall, back before we knew how easily precious things could disintegrate in the salt air.”

Monaghan positions Sam’s childhood bedroom on Long Island as a symbolic portal into her past, introducing the novel’s thematic interest in The Challenges of Navigating Past and Present Relationships. Sam can describe her sketches of Wyatt in the present without even opening her sketch pad and looking at them. For her, the room represents a gateway into her memories and foreshadows the ways in which the Long Island environment will help Sam rediscover her old self.

“The ocean is reaching out to me and I’m afraid it’s going to crack me right open, and there I’ll be like a Russian doll, with layers falling off until I’m so small that a seagull could just pluck me out of the sand and swallow me. I remember my body in the ocean, unburdened and strong. I remember the feel of Wyatt’s skin on mine for the first time, just where the waves break. I remember standing under the linden tree and willing my hands not to touch his stomach. I haven’t thought about that in a long time and the memory of it makes me smile. I close my eyes and remember the kiss that came next. I can feel the breeze off the ocean, I can hear Wyatt’s guitar.”

Monaghan’s use of metaphor, figurative language, and sensory detail in this passage captures Sam’s deep relationship with Long Island’s oceanic setting. Sam is afraid to reacquaint herself with the place because she knows how connected she feels to this environment.