67 pages • 2 hours read
Emily HenryBeach Read
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 14-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 14 Summary: “The Rule”
Through their window notes, Gus apologizes for getting “weird” the previous night. January realizes she needs to proceed with caution because she understands how relationship-phobes function. They exchange phone numbers through their window notes but vow to continue writing notes anyway. January makes some progress on her book but takes a break to drop off some items to Goodwill. When she returns, she finally explores the beach.
While enjoying the breeze and the sand, January thinks about how alone she feels. She misses her dad, despite his flaws, and misses the connection she used to have with her mom. She misses having someone who loves her waiting at home for her, like when she was with Jacques. She even misses her quirky neighbors and laments the fact that Shadi is so far away. She feels like she has no one around except Gus. The thoughts weigh so heavily that she sits down in the sand and cries. She pulls herself together only because a seagull poops on her head. As she is heading back up to the house, she runs into Gus, who was coming to see her. Seeing her sadness, he embraces her tightly.
Later, January takes Gus to a drive-in playing a Meg Ryan triple-feature. Gus is unhappy about the six-hour commitment to sitting through romantic comedies, but January assures him it’ll be fun. January has beer in a cooler and pillows in her back seat, and they settle in to watch the movies.
As the movies play, they shift positions regularly, always touching and occasionally meeting gazes. When January feels like she cannot handle the intensity between them, she quickly says she has to pee and springs up, hitting her head against the roof of her car. Concerned, Gus takes her head in his hands to make sure she isn’t bleeding. Their gazes lock, and they kiss passionately. Things get heavy quickly, but they are stopped when a worker for the drive-in shines a flashlight on them and kicks them out.
The next day, January worries that she’s ruined her only friendship in town when Gus doesn’t appear at the window all day. She goes grocery shopping but leaves without her items when she sees Sonya at the checkout. When she gets home, she realizes Gus’s car isn’t at his house. She watches over the next few days as he doesn’t return. January ignores an email from Sonya regarding the book club. She texts Anya that she is making progress on her book and agrees to meet up with Pete in a few days to sign copies of her books for the store. She progresses her book’s plot, deciding to give her main characters darker storylines that are the antithesis of romance.
Chapter 15 Summary: “The Past”
January meets Pete at her bookstore. While signing books, January learns that Pete is Gus’s aunt on his mother’s side and that they speak often. Pete says she can tell January and Gus are spending time together from the limited details she gathers from Gus. January is disconcerted that Gus never mentioned this connection.
Pete tells January to be patient with Gus because he really likes her. Pete reveals that the night January and Gus met was Gus’s birthday. His friends throw him a party every year because his wife left him on his birthday and they want to take Gus’s mind off his divorce. January is shocked by all this information because Gus revealed so little to her while she was an open book to him. She feels Gus must think she’s naive for still believing in everlasting love despite her dad’s infidelity.
Chapter 16 Summary: “The Porch Furniture”
On Thursday, Gus reappears in the window after being gone since Sunday. He writes a note apologizing for being gone. In the evening, Gus gestures for January to join him out on their respective decks. January declines. She goes to her front porch instead and decides to finally contact Sonya. January emails Sonya asking if she’d like to take the porch furniture or if January should sell it.
The next day, Gus comes by. Dave is in his house for the interview, and Gus wants January to come over to take part. When January gets there, she realizes it’s the first time she’s seen Gus’s house. Dave apologizes for flaking on their Olive Garden meeting. Gus assures him that his story won’t be put directly in the book, just used to tell a similar story with more realism. January acknowledges, “I knew he wasn’t writing to save lives so much as to understand what had destroyed them” (179).
Dave tells the story of how his family got into the cult and how he and his mother escaped. He explains that he was struck by lightning as a kid and that his mom took that as a sign from God. They joined the cult shortly after. Later, Dave’s mom caught him sleepwalking, and when she left the trailer, lightning struck it, so she knew it was time to leave the cult. His dad was in too deep at this point, and his mom knew that if she told his dad, his dad would report them. Dave and his mom left without a word. January thinks about Gus’s childhood and wishes someone could’ve rescued him.
When Dave leaves, Gus offers January a drink and tells her he’s happy to see her. As Gus makes their drinks, January struggles to find something to say. She remarks on his new tattoo, which is just a cover of a tattoo she’d noticed previously. He responds dismissively without talking about it further. January, disappointed that Gus won’t tell her about his life, declines the drink and leaves. Gus walks her out and tells her again that it’s good to see her.
Chapters 14-16 Analysis
After much buildup, Gus and January finally give in to the sexual tension between them. Their make-out session in the back of January’s car is the first time both of them completely unleash on each other. Without intervention from the drive-in worker, they would’ve easily taken their physical intimacy further. Once again, their most intimate moments happen when they are physically close in the car.
Gus’s subsequent disappearance only reinforces January’s fears about him: that he is still the same person he was in college, moving from girl to girl, fling to fling, without settling down or committing to anything. She’s sure now that she’s scared him off and even questions whether she threw herself at him. Her spiraling anxiety at Gus’s absence reveals itself through her writing.
The decisions January makes for her characters are a direct reflection of her emotional state. The mother has a gun, showing that January is thinking destructive thoughts. The dad owes money to dangerous people, reflecting January’s empty bank account and the stress that comes with it. The daughter has a failed romance—January isn’t yet sure whether it will be because the boy wants a different woman, because he moves away for college, or because he is persuaded by his family not to be with the daughter. Instead of thinking of all the ways a story could end happily, January is brainstorming dark, tragic endings for her characters.
The Chapter 15 reveal of Gus’s familial ties to the town as well as his divorce leaves January even more hurt. While she’s poured her heart out to him time and again, Gus has revealed very small pieces of himself that January now finds shallow. It doesn’t matter to her that he’s afraid of vomit or had an abusive dad because he’s left out key information about his life, like being related to Pete and having been married. January is already in an anxious state about their kiss when Pete tells her that Gus likes her, so it’s difficult for her to feel that is true.
Gus’s marriage is a particularly disturbing twist for January. While it is only slightly foreshadowed by the fact that he owns a tuxedo, it takes January by surprise because she has always seen Gus as anti-romance and anti-commitment. January feels both hurt that he never felt the need to tell her about his divorce and jealous that there is a woman out there who made Gus want to commit his life to her. January also becomes self-conscious about what Gus must think of her positive outlook on romance because of his own failed marriage.
After the revelation of Gus’s marriage, January notices all the ways in which she and Gus are still so distant. She acknowledges the metaphor within their nights spent on their respective decks with a large physical gap between them. She recognizes that she’d never seen Gus’s house despite the weeks they’d spent hanging out. She’s become much more analytical of every aspect of Gus and just how carefully he’s kept space between them. When she gives him another opportunity to speak about himself by remarking on his tattoo, he offers no information about it.
Despite her steps backwards from her relationship with Gus, January takes a large step forward in dealing with her dad’s legacy. While in Chapter 14 January literally runs away from Sonya and ignores any emails she sees from Sonya, in Chapter 16 January finally reaches out to her regarding the porch furniture. It takes all her emotional energy, and the email is very brief. However, the fact that she put in the effort to communicate with Sonya shows January is growing and learning to stop avoiding things that are painful, perhaps as a result of tapping into her darker emotions for her book.
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By Emily Henry
