Sydney Rose Parnell

Sydney Rose Parnell is the main character and narrator of the novel. She is the heroine though she is a very flawed heroine. Parnell carries a good deal of baggage from a traumatic childhood as well as her eight years working in Mortuary Affairs in Iraq. When Parnell was nine, she and her mother were abandoned by Parnell’s father. Parnell has felt unworthy of love since that time. A year later, her mother killed a man by pushing him in front of a train. Her mother claimed that the killing was in self-defense but a jury condemned her to jail. Parnell worried that if she let go of herself she would do something just as terrible.

When Parnell brings Rhodes back alive after she and Clyde track him through a snowstorm, Parnell seems to prove that she is a better person than her mother. Not...