Jar of Hearts

Ella calls Geo from prison and tells her that Cat died the previous night. Geo is heartbroken. Her doorbell rings. She sees through a window that it’s a police officer, but not Kaiser, so she ignores it. Then, Kaiser texts Geo saying that he’s sent a police detail to her house and warning her to stay at home, for her safety. 

Geo finds Dominic on Facebook and sends him a message, asking to meet with him. He responds immediately and offers to come to her, saying that he’d like to see family photos and meet his grandfather, Walt. When a truck pulls up in front of the house about an hour later, the police officer posted out front starts to get out of his car. Geo opens the front door and tells the officer that it’s family and she’s expecting him, so the officer returns to his car. Then, the newcomer exits his truck, and Geo sees Calvin James walking toward her.

Geo quickly realizes that the man isn’t really Calvin, though he looks just like Calvin when he was young. Dominic has Geo’s eyes and smile, however. After some small talk, Dominic asks about his father but then reveals that he already knows who his father is. He learned Geo’s name from Nori, and he read about her testimony in Calvin’s trial. He saw pictures of Calvin and noticed how much they resemble each other. Dominic asks Geo if she killed Angela. She says no but admits that she helped Calvin cover up the murder. Dominic says that her actions weren’t just a mistake but indicative of a character issue and that she’s a terrible person. Geo admits that Dominic was conceived by rape and goes to the bathroom to cry and compose herself. When she rejoins him, she tells herself, she’ll tell him he’s in danger.

Geo finds Dominic in her bedroom, sitting on her bed and looking at yearbooks. He says that he read about Calvin’s love of cinnamon hearts in a profile and that he loves them too. He pulls a bag of them from his pocket to show her. Geo tells Dominic that Calvin has been killing his own children. Dominic makes a comment about the lipstick hearts on the children, which Geo realizes wasn’t mentioned in the newspapers. She realizes the implication and tries to run, but Dominic grabs her. He starts strangling her and pulling her pants down.

In a flashback to the night of Angela’s murder, Geo is driving Calvin’s car with Angela’s body in the trunk. She drives to the woods near her house and leads Calvin to a clearing she knows of. She tells him to get shovels from her father’s shed. When they realize that the ground is too hard to dig deeper than three feet, Geo tells Calvin to go back to the shed and get her father’s saw. Despite their previous power dynamic, Geo realizes that she’s in charge now. She tells Calvin to cut Angela’s body up so that they can fit it into several shallower holes. Calvin resists the idea, and he cries and vomits as he begins the task. He can’t finish, so Geo has to take over dismembering the body. From the time they drive into the neighborhood until they finish burying Angela and go home, Geo keeps expecting to get caught, but nobody sees them.

Dominic resumes strangling Geo, having found himself unable to rape her as he intended. She’s about to lose consciousness when Calvin enters, rips Dominic off her, and then kicks him in the head when he’s on the ground. Calvin says that he “took care of” the police officer out front (297). He tells Geo that he’s been keeping an eye on her because of the latest murders and adds that he would never hurt a child. When he heard about the dismemberment and disposal locations, he says, he felt like he was being called home because only he and Geo knew about her role in cutting up Angela’s body.

Calvin is shocked when Dominic calls Geo “mother.” He accuses Dominic of killing the children to hurt him, but Dominic says that his intention was to hurt Geo. He asks why they should get to have good mothers and good lives when he didn’t. Geo finds the gun she hid under her pillow and trains it on the two men. Dominic still wants to rape Geo and encourages Calvin to help him overpower her. Calvin says that he won’t let Dominic hurt her and tells Geo to leave. Instead, she shoots and kills them both.

Geo visits Angela’s and her mother’s graves at the cemetery. Dominic is buried next to her mother in the family plot because Geo wanted to give him the peace in death that she couldn’t give him when he was alive. She’s in a relationship with Kaiser now and pregnant with his child. For the first time since she was 16, happiness outweighs her grief.