“I’ve made a lot of bad choices in my life, not least accepting Andy’s invitation for a drink at the bar after lunch, and I still haven’t decided if testifying was one of them. Sure, I’d have had to learn to live with staying silent, but I’ve had to learn to live with speaking out too, and I’m not sure which is worse.”

This quote underscores the theme of Familial Loyalty and Betrayal as the rest of the Cunningham family denounces Ernie’s decision to reveal Michael’s murder of Alan Holton to police. At the time, Ernie was torn between his conscience—doing what he believed was right—and his commitment to his family, who placed protecting one another from the law above any other moral commitment.

“Dad was always out at night; it came with the territory. I have affectionate memories of him, I truly do, but what I think of most when I think about him is the spaces he left. It was easier to tell where my dad had been than to see where he was. The empty armchair in the living room. The plate in the oven. Stubble in the bathroom sink. Three empty holsters in a six-pack in the fridge. My father was footprints, residue.”

Though he is deceased when the novel takes place, Ernie’s father, Robert, drives the novel’s conflict. This quote speaks to the symbolic nature of Robert’s character: Though he is physically absent, this absence is both palpable and important, just as was the case when Ernie was a child.

“[When] Detective McMuffin had me holed up in an interview room a couple of decades later and wouldn’t believe anything I was telling him[,] I wasn’t Ernest Cunningham anymore. I was ‘his kid.’ My mother became ‘his widow.’ Our family name was an invisible tattoo: we were the family of a cop killer.”

The Cunningham reputation is an important trope throughout the novel, tied into the themes of The Quest for the Truth and Righting Past Wrongs. Ernie is, by merely sharing his father’s last name, regarded as suspicious by police. Importantly, Robert is not just a criminal, but elevated as the worst kind of criminal because he has killed a police officer. The irony that will become apparent is that the police who died and were involved with Robert were criminals as well.