The Sanatorium

“This place, like Isaac, is all about facades. Covering up what really lies beneath.” 

Elin compares the hotel’s pristine façade to that of her brother Isaac’s. While the hotel is luxurious and pristine on the outside, it hides a tragic past as a former sanatorium. Likewise, this quote suggests that Elin believes Isaac is manipulative and violent underneath his veneer of normalcy and it foreshadows that she believes Isaac had a part in Sam’s death. 

“Elin soon got the sense that he didn’t see her the way she had always seen herself. The effect was almost dizzying: it made her want to live up to what he saw in her, or what he thought he saw.” 

Will, unlike Elin, tends to see the best in people. Elin believes that Will loves her so much that he sees someone great in her, even though she has a negative self-image. This quote builds the characters of both Elin, as a somewhat negative person, and Will, as a more optimistic person. 

“How do you go about unpicking someone from your life when they’re the thread tying every part of you together?” 

So much of Elin’s life has been about Sam’s death. She even chose her career as a detective because she wanted to get to the bottom of Sam’s death. She is holding on tightly to Sam’s memory, partially because she has developed her entire personhood around getting justice for her brother, and she wouldn’t know who she is if she finally let go of him.