61 pages • 2 hours read
The Note
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Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Our David Smith”
Part 2, Chapter 13 Summary
East Hampton detective Carter Decker eats a sandwich while going over phone records. He receives a phone call from the lawyer of Rhode Island socialite Tinsley Smith, the mother of David Smith. Carter reviews the pictures of David, recognizing him as New England “Old Money.” Carter then explains to the lawyer that David is likely not at risk. However, Tinsley says that David’s lack of communication is very unusual for him.
Part 2, Chapter 14 Summary
May and Lauren are mystified by Kelsey’s decision to leave the malicious prank note on David’s car. Kelsey rationalizes her action by stating that she was drunk and it was a spur-of-the-moment choice. They debate whether to call the police or the number on the flier. Lauren tells May that reporting their sighting of David could backfire and have a detrimental effect on May’s new job. Meanwhile, Nate arrives at the train station, and Kelsey leaves to pick him up.
Part 2, Chapter 15 Summary
May conducts an online search for information about David Smith, but Lauren tells her that the police are more capable of investigating him effectively. May worries that a security camera will show Kelsey leaving the note on David’s car. When Kelsey returns with Nate, May feels awkward about seeing him, and she also feels guilty when she automatically starts comparing him to Josh and feeling more attracted to Nate than to her fiancé.
As May drives back to the city, she thinks about her past relationship with Nate. May was not allowed to date in high school; Nate first kissed May when they were both juniors in college. May then started having sex with Nate in secret, fearing Kelsey’s potential reaction to the news of the relationship. However, when Kelsey caught May in bed with Nate, Kelsey was excited and encouraged the relationship.
Over the years, the dynamic between the three of them shifted. May and Nate maintained a long-distance relationship, but he started talking about moving to New York, and May spent too much time thinking about how best to please him. She even turned down an opportunity to travel with the moot court team to Stanford for spring break so that she could visit Nate instead. At the time, May demanded that they make a sex tape and tried to seem empowered, but she was ashamed to realize that she looked small and nervous. She never really broke up with him officially; instead, she just stopped responding to his communications, and Kelsey wanted to know what was going on between them. Four years later, Nate moved to New York to pursue acting. He tried to seduce May, but she turned him down. Once Josh made it clear that he was serious about May, she couldn’t help but compare them.
Now, May feels very anxious. She decides to stop in Sag Harbor before continuing on to the city.
Part 2, Chapter 16 Summary
Two days later, May receives a call from her doorman, telling her that two police officers are waiting to see her. Josh observes that she has been very high-strung since returning home from a supposedly relaxing weekend, and he clearly senses that she is not telling him something important.
She meets with Detective Danny Brennan (who was also her principal law enforcement witness in her previous trial), along with a trainee named Clark, who explains that they received a call from a detective in East Hampton. They show her a photo of David Smith and ask if she saw him at all. Brennan expects that May will take considerable interest in this, since she is known to be a tenacious prosecutor who has been dubbed “Miss Nancy Drew.” May suddenly realizes that her detour to Sag Harbor on the way home got her into trouble; she had gone back to the restaurant to see if anyone remembered seeing David. Now, as she is interrogated, she debates the pros and cons of telling the truth. If she decides to be completely honest with the detectives, she risks losing both her friends and her job. The detectives ask her to provide her friends’ contact information.
Part 2, Chapter 17 Summary
A series of tweets and headlines reveal the public backlash to May’s op-ed and subway platform debacle. In the first two days after the publication of the op-ed, she was celebrated. Then the clip of her on the subway platform was posted, showing that she mistook a Black man named Darren Foster as her assailant, when it was really a white man who called her a racial slur. She issued a statement of apology, and the hashtag #AsianDAKaren trended for almost a week. Josh was supportive in the midst of the scandal and accommodated her requests to hide inside.
May became a “Milkshake Duck”—a slang term denoting a person who initially becomes popular online for positive reasons but quickly incites outrage when negative aspects of their past are uncovered. Lauren called her to reassure her that everything would work out in the end. She pointed out that only a small fraction of the population saw the video, and May believed that she would be able to move on with her life.
Part 2, Chapter 18 Summary
In the present, Carter watches the viral video of May. He then receives a call from Simon Bowlby, a friend of David’s who explains that David went to East Hampton with his girlfriend, Christine. (Tinsley Smith has not met Christine.) Simon also shares that David has been known to engage with many women on Instagram and had been seeing someone else who was his original Hamptons date. Simon thought that this person turned out to be a “crackpot.” He hopes that David is just out partying and is not truly missing. Then, Christine calls Carter to tell him that she is on her way to the station.
Part 2, Chapter 19 Summary
Lauren first noticed Thomas flirting with her when she was 26 and he was 50. Now, he calls her while she is at the beach house, and she reflects on their relationship, musing that her habit of seeing him once a week is a convenient arrangement. His wife does not mind their relationship but does want to divorce Thomas for socioeconomic reasons.
The narrative reveals that Marnie Mann drowned during Lauren’s ninth summer at the camp. Lauren had already known that her job as a counselor was threatened when Marnie, a notorious gossip, walked in on Lauren and Thomas in her cabin. An anonymous note had been slipped into the admin offices, detailing Lauren and Thomas’s affair, but Lauren thought that this approach was out of character for Marnie; Lauren had expected the girl to use her new knowledge as currency to gain popularity at camp.
Now, Thomas offers to pick Lauren up from the airport. Lauren reflects on her friendships with the other two women. She suspects that May only accepted Josh’s proposal because she fears loneliness. Neither Lauren nor Kelsey are fans of Josh.
The narrative reveals that Kelsey was very open to becoming a member of Lauren’s found family because her own family was so fragmented. Even now, Kelsey’s overbearing father, Bill, still controls many aspects of her life. The night that Kelsey’s husband was shot in the midst of a robbery, Kelsey was onstage while her father received an award.
In the present, May calls to tell Lauren and Kelsey and warns them to expect a phone call from the police. She confesses that she went back to the restaurant and asked about David. They are relieved to learn that May has not told Josh anything about the incident during their girls’ weekend.
Part 2, Chapter 20 Summary
An article from the Houston Weekly describes the scandalous affair between Lauren and Thomas, suggesting that Lauren only received her historic appointment as the first Black Music Director of the Houston Symphony because of the affair. Although Lauren had played at Carnegie Hall when she was 15 and attended Tulane on a music scholarship, then went on to produce scores for movies, Thomas’s wife, Jessica, emailed a member of the symphony’s board of directors to complain that Thomas abused his power to secure Lauren’s job.
Part 2, Chapter 21 Summary
Part 2 Analysis
In these chapters, Burke reveals more details about the scandals in the women’s respective pasts in order to examine the various ways in which history, secrets, and lies can sabotage and reshape relationships. As the current crisis reveals The Fragility of Trust, the pasts of Kelsey, Lauren, and May reverberate into the present, forcing the friends to navigate a world in which trust is precarious, secrets are burdensome, and identity is continually reshaped. As each woman attempts to control her own narrative, she is forced to reconcile the difficulty of escaping her previous acts of deception.
As the primary protagonist, May’s personal and professional crises have a profound impact on the narrative. Although Burke employs a third-person omniscient perspective that provides to the inner thoughts of May, Lauren, and Kelsey, May’s outlook remains dominant, and the overall narrative is therefore influenced by her perspective, flaws, and inhibitions. Most notably, the lens of her perspective demonstrates the discrepancies between her internal thoughts and the more confident image that she projects to the world, and the contrast between her emotions and her actions becomes most prominent whenever she reflects on her relationship with Josh. This effect is further heightened by her friends’ skepticism over the hyper-critical, pessimistic May’s attempts to idealize her relationship.
As the aftermath of the girls’ weekend unfolds, it becomes clear that May’s secrecy and shame are creating a divide between her and Josh, further demonstrating The Fragility of Trust. Although Josh senses May’s emotional withdrawal after her return from the Hamptons, she refuses to confide in him, actively withholding the truth about David Smith and the police inquiry and choosing self-preservation over transparency. Even before the girl’s weekend begins, she chooses not to tell Josh that Nate, her former boyfriend, will join her friends at the beach house, and this decision creates yet more tension with Josh later in the novel, when she must return to the beach house in the midst of Nate’s visit. May’s lack of openness demonstrates that trust is eroded not only by deception but also by omission.
However, May’s reluctance to tell Josh about her concerns reflects her broader fear of judgment: a fear that has been shaped by her public humiliation and past experiences of exercising secrecy in relationships, particularly with Nate. Although Josh supported her in the aftermath of the subway scandal, May still does not feel that she can trust him with the information surrounding David’s disappearance and Nate’s presence. In this way, her willingness to bear The Burden of Secrets complicates her relationships: a pattern that she has followed ever since she and Nate tried to hide their relationship from Kelsey years ago. Even when their relationship became more serious, May struggled with vulnerability, choosing to distance herself rather than communicating her discomfort. Her inability to fully trust Nate—and by extension, herself—led to their silent breakup. Now, years later, Nate’s reappearance triggers May’s old insecurities, forcing her to grapple with the ways in which her past still influences her present.
May’s hesitancy to speak openly about her subway platform incident—where she mistook a Black man as her assailant—demonstrates the weight of public perception. The scandal following the viral clip permanently alters how she sees herself, forcing her to retreat from the public eye. The subway incident and its ensuing controversy define her public persona, reducing her accomplishments to a single moment of perceived racial insensitivity. She reflects on her new identity as a “Milkshake Duck,” someone whose initial perceived positivity was quickly replaced by knowledge about something negative that they have done or that they believe. Though she attempts to move beyond the repercussions of this moment, the past remains a defining force in her present.
Lauren’s affair with Thomas Welliver also exemplifies The Fragility of Trust, particularly in the public sphere. As the first Black Music Director of the Houston Symphony, she finds that her achievements are overshadowed by accusations of favoritism and unethical conduct. When the press suggests that her relationship with Thomas played a role in her appointment, this malicious narrative openly questions the legitimacy of her very real accomplishments. Despite her long-held status as an accomplished musician, the mere perception of impropriety now taints her credibility. This public scrutiny underscores the novel’s suggestion that trust is easily undermined, especially for women of color who hold positions of power and influence. This is not the first time that Lauren has been scrutinized because of her identity as a Black woman, for she also became the scapegoat after Marnie’s death by drowning. As she bitterly observes, “Apparently, if something really bad happens in an idyllic place, all eyes move to the person who’s not quite like the others” (188).
Just like her friends, Kelsey also struggles with trust, particularly when it comes to her overbearing father, who continues to exert control over her life. Similarly, the lingering suspicions surrounding the circumstances of Luke’s murder follow her everywhere, preventing her from using her true identity with new friends. In many ways, Kelsey’s struggles exemplify The Impact of Personal History on Identity, for despite her privileged lifestyle, her own identity is molded by the early loss of her mother, which catalyzed her need for belonging and prompted her to find solace in the “found family” of May and Lauren. Even in the narrative present, her desire to create her own family explains why she is willing to overlook many of Nate’s flaws and why she is determined to use her frozen embryos to start a family in the wake of Luke’s death.
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