“Why make friends when she was just going to leave?”

As Candice tries to adjust to her summer life in Lambert, South Carolina, she struggles to decide how to embed herself in the new social fabric. When she is tricked into meeting the boy across the street, she thinks to herself that it is futile to try to make new friends. This foreshadows Candice’s eventual conflict as she struggles with feeling sad at leaving Lambert because it means leaving her new friendship behind.

“Find the path. Solve the puzzle.”

A handwritten note from Abigail Caldwell to Candice references the sentiment that the path forward isn’t always visible; Candice eventually realizes that her grandmother had been trying to prepare her to solve the mystery of the Parker inheritance. Candice is skeptical about sharing this personal connection to the case with Brandon, but after some time she shares it with him as well.

“An inheritance. A fortune. Enough for them to keep their house. Enough to stop them from moving.”

One of the primary conflicts of the novel is an internal one for young Candice, who struggles with complicated feelings about her parents’ divorce and lack of money. When she realizes that she could find “a fortune” and stop her life from changing as drastically, she is newly motivated to solve the mystery. This early way of thinking also foreshadows Candice’s learning process as she figures out that solving the mystery means much more than keeping her family’s house.