Hannah thinks her best friend Jules has come to comfort her, but Jules indicates she is somehow complicit in Owen’s disappearance. Before it is revealed how Jules may be involved, however, Hannah dips into the friends’ past and tells the reader the two met in Peekskill, New York. Hannah’s grandfather moved them from Tennessee to New York when Hannah was a freshman in high school, and Hannah and Jules met while applying for dog-walking jobs. They spent hours walking dogs together and, despite the fact that Jules was the daughter of a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and attended private school, became best friends:

We were so removed from each other’s actual lives that we told each other everything. Jules once compared it to how you confide in a stranger you meet on a plane. From the beginning, this is what we’ve been to each other: safe, airborne (29).

Jules is a photo editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she works with an investigative reporter named Max who has a romantic interest in her.

Jules is a loyal and truthful friend, as evidenced by the memory of her teenaged outrage against Hannah’s two-timing boyfriend, and Hannah can tell that Jules is about to tell her something difficult that will explain why Owen’s disappearance is her fault.