56 pages • 1 hour read
The Heiress
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Chapter 16-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary: “Jules”
Jules watches while Cam reads Ruby’s letters. When he’s done, she asks if he knows who Ruby wrote them to. He points out that it doesn’t matter, as they must’ve never been sent if she found them in the office. He is grateful that Ben and Howell never found them. Jules waits for him to wonder why, if Ben found the safe deposit box key, he never found the letters, but Cam never asks.
Jules loves Cam too much to force him to stay at Ashby House any longer, so she suggests they leave. Cam asks her to pack their bags and promises to be back by dark. He asks her to destroy Ruby’s letters while he’s gone.
After Cam leaves, Jules packs their things, with Ruby’s letters at the bottom of her bag. She goes back to Ruby’s study but doesn’t find what she’s looking for. While she’s searching, Ben comes into the room and confronts her. He pulls out a final letter from Ruby that he found in her study. In it, Ruby tells her reader to take the name Jules, a form of her middle name, Julianne.
Ben threatens to tell Cam, and Jules realizes he would do it just to hurt Cam. She lashes out and accuses Ben of killing Nelle; from Ben’s reaction, she realizes that it is true. She takes the letter from Ben’s hands and turns to leave the room.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Camden”
Cam drives to Knoxville, about two hours away. He is familiar with the route, as he’d found his birth mother, Penny Halliday, there when he was younger and had gone several times, without directly contacting her, just to see her. Now, as he sits outside the art center Penny teaches at, he realizes that she is not his family and neither are the McTavishes. Jules is his family. She knows his secrets as he knows hers—in fact, he knows more about her secrets than she realizes.
Cam reveals that after he and Jules dated for a while, he’d become suspicious of her. She would occasionally mention something about his history or family that he’d never told her. He hired a private investigator and found out that Jules was actually Caitlin Julianne Darnell, the granddaughter of Claire Darnell, Ruby’s sister.
Cam realized that Jules and Ruby were connected but was curious about their plan and decided not to say anything. As time went on, however, he fell in love with Jules and could tell that she loved him, too. He waited for her to say something, but she never did. He trusts their love and can live with the secret.
Now, Cam returns to Ashby House; he sees a glow on the horizon and realizes that the house is on fire. There are ambulances and fire trucks there, and Jules is on a stretcher. Crying, Jules tells Cam that Ben was inside the house; Cam can tell, despite Jules’s tears, that she is responsible for Ben’s death. He hopes that one day she will tell him the truth herself. They watch the house burn.
The chapter closes with Ruby’s final letter and a letter from Jules to Ruby. In Ruby’s letter, she tells Jules how connected she’s felt to her since they met. Ruby wants to be able to pay the Darnell family back and decides to bring Jules into her existing plan to do it. While making Cam her heir was about taking from the McTavishes, including Jules would be about giving back to the Darnells. She tells Jules that Cam is in California and that she will need to be “subtle” in her approach. However, she knows that Jules’s strength and intelligence will be good for Cam, and she feels good about leaving the McTavish fortune in their hands.
After Ruby died, Jules wondered if she should abandon their plan but saw no reason not to go ahead with it. She moved to California, and one night, she walked into a bar and recognized Cam from the pictures Ruby sent. She thinks it must have been fate.
Epilogue Summary: “Jules: Eight Months Later”
Jules sips her tea and watches the sun rise over the ocean. She says she is pregnant but then admits she is telling the reader this for sympathy. While Cam is a good person, she is “only middling,” but she hopes their daughter will have a good chance of being a good person.
She knows that the reader must be having a hard time having sympathy for her: She set Ashby House on fire, murdered Ben, and accidentally killed Libby. However, the story is more complicated—when she turned to leave Ruby’s office, Ben hit her head with a paperweight. She grabbed the fireplace poker and swung it at his head.
After it happened, Jules thought about Ruby. She knew she would get away with it if she leveraged the McTavish name to quiet questions and investigation. She told the police that she found Ben in Ruby’s office burning something, and he attacked her. In the struggle, the fire spread. The authorities accepted her story.
Now, Jules sees Cam jogging down the beach, and she goes inside. Ruby’s portrait, the only thing that survived the fire, hangs over the fireplace in their new house. Jules’s feelings about Ruby are more complicated now that she knows how badly the other woman hurt Cam.
Cam enters, and Jules notices again how much more relaxed he is since Ashby House burned. She reflects that they got their “happy ending.” As she makes breakfast, Jules wonders if she should tell Cam the truth about how they met and about her connection to Ruby. The night of the fire, she ran back into the house to get Ruby’s letters, especially the last one, and all were hidden safely away. When she’d recently cut the back of Ruby’s portrait to hide the letters, she’d found that someone else had already hidden something there: an old newspaper clipping with a photo from a parade in Bishop, Iowa. Ruby had apparently realized that two women at the edge of the photo looked like the real Ruby McTavish and her nanny, Grace. Jules thinks that maybe Grace had taken Ruby away to save her from the corruption of the McTavish fortune, but she will never pursue the truth.
Looking at the portrait now, Jules thinks about how lovely Ruby looks and how much she and Andrew were in love when the portrait was painted. She thinks about the darkness that Ruby was concealing, and how one would never know what she was hiding. Jules finds similarities between Ruby, herself, and even Cam—looking at any one of them, no one would ever guess what they’d done. She and Cam both like to think that those moments where they killed are over and that they only did it because they had to, but sometimes, she wonders.
Chapter 16-Epilogue Analysis
Chapter 16 unpacks some of the plot twists and reveals of the novel. Jules gives Cam the letters to read without sharing how they came into her possession. He doesn’t ask how she got the letters, a question that seems obvious to her. To Jules, this supports her belief that Cam is a “good person” and that he trusts her implicitly. Hawkins uses dramatic irony again here—the reader has information that Jules doesn’t have that might change her perspective: Cam knows about her collaboration with Ruby and has since nearly the beginning. Chapter 16 also includes the revelation that Ben killed Nelle, suffocating her with a pillow in an echo of how Cam finally killed Ruby. This is one of the last things that changes Jules’s mind for good. While before, she’d wanted to leave for Cam’s sake, now she realizes that she “thought love would be enough to chase out the darkness” (258), but they cannot change the McTavish family or Ashby House. Jules has finally realized what Cam knew all along: With the McTavishes, The Influence of Family Culture on the Individual is pervasive and toxic, and they need to escape it.
At the same time, Cam is realizing, all over again, that Jules is his family, bringing the theme of Rediscovering the Past from a New Perspective to its culmination. He has already dismissed the McTavishes as family but still feels the need to consider his birth mother. Ultimately, however, he realizes, “Jules is my family. Jules, who sees the darkest parts of me, the worst thing I ever did, and loves me anyway. Just like I see the darkest parts of her, the worst thing she’s ever done, and love her, too” (267). This is the preface to Cam’s final confession—that he knows about Jules’s connection to Ruby and has for many years.
Hawkins utilizes a popular Gothic convention in the novel’s final chapter when Ashby House burns. One of the most famous examples of this classic Gothic convention is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. At the end of Jane Eyre, the house that has been host to all the lies and deceit of the story is destroyed. The destruction allows the characters to leave the past behind. The manner of the house’s destruction is meaningful, as fire is often a symbol of cleansing and rebirth. Fires are also about transformation, and with the burning of Ashby House (and Ben and Libby), Cam and Jules are free to remake the McTavish family in a new way.
At the conclusion of the novel, both Cam and Jules continue to keep secrets from each other, highlighting the insidious nature of The Influence of Family Culture on the Individual. Hawkins uses the Epilogue to jump forward in time from the moment where Cam and Jules are watching Ashby House burn to their new life. Jules again addresses the reader directly, asking for understanding for her actions, even frankly using her pregnancy as a bid for empathy. Jules is still preoccupied with What Makes a Good Person, but this time, for the sake of her daughter. Again, she has a stake in believing that Cam is a good person, as she is, she admits, “[o]nly middling.” Dramatic irony comes into play again here, as the reader is privy to the fact that not only does Cam know about her plan with Ruby, but he also knows that she killed Ben. Jules, in turn, reveals that she is keeping the newspaper clipping she found a secret from Ben, for Ruby’s sake. This secret Jules keeps shows that Ruby still plays an outsized role in the McTavish family, even in its new incarnation. The fact that her portrait is hanging prominently in their new house says the same, and Jules admits that even though “[Ruby’d] manipulated him—manipulated [her]—in ways [she] might never fully understand” (285), both she and Cam still feel connected to her. There is hope that they are taking the McTavish family culture in a new direction, as they’ve established an endowment for Tavistock, but the reminder of Ruby’s donations after her husbands’ murders suggests that they may be using money to avoid accountability and assuage guilt, just as the McTavishes have always done.
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