Falk's adult relationships have not been what he hoped. Do you think events surrounding Ellie's death and his relationship with Ellie in life affected his ability to engage with people, and if so, in what ways?

"Why couldn't he let her in? Why wouldn't he let her in? Did he not trust her? Or did he not love her enough?" (p. 140). Falk's adult relationships have not been what he hoped. Do you think events surrounding Ellie's death and his relationship with Ellie in life affected his ability to engage with people, and if so, in what ways?

More than Ellie, I think Falk's relationship with his father affected his ability to engage with people. Instead of trusting his son was telling the truth, his father decided that leaving the unpleasantness was better than confronting it.

Falk was always quiet and shy, seemingly deferring to Luke or granting him center stage. Just as he was gaining confidence in himself and beginning to trust that he was liked (at least by Ellie) for who he was, she was murdered. An entire town that knew him from the time he was a baby doubted him. His own father questioned whether or not he killed her. Luke may have provided an alibi, but he did not provide the emotional support a best friend should have at this time. And he very easily could have cleared everything up by telling the authorities that he and Gretchen saw Ellie by the river. Falk considered Luke's parents to be just as important as his own in his life. They did not defend him.

The people he most trusted in his life burned him, doubted him, turned away from him. In spite of knowing the kind of person he had always been (studious, kind, outdoorsy, friendly), in one instant that was erased and people believed he could have been a murderer as well. I think he had had enough loss in his life and he chose not to engage on deeper levels as a means of protecting what little he had left. It was not worth the risk to expose himself to people, only to be hurt.

His relationship with his father forever jaded him. It hurts when a best friend or town thinks your guilty, but it hurts more coming from his own father. He did not let people get close. He has trust issues from his childhood. His relationship with Luke who is supposed to be a best friend is at an awkward stage. This was seen when Falk and Luke last meet.

I feel that he was always a "follower". After Ellie's death and following the reaction of the townspeople and the lack of trust from his father, Aaron was scared. The people he had trusted and thought would be there for him turned their backs on him, and the betrayal kept him from trusting anyone. His job puts him in a space where he is not supposed to trust people to be honest, he is supposed to root out the cheaters, and that makes him even more guarded. It is hopeful that he is aware of this issue, that's the first step for getting help!

More than his relationship with Ellie, what affected Aaron's relationships with others seems to me to be the forever strained relationship with his father, and being run out of town by people who disbelieved him and persecuted both Falks, suspecting that one or the other of them caused Ellie's death. And as Ruthiea says, having a job which by its nature leads you to mistrust everyone has to affect the way you see the world and the people in it. Early in my professional career, I spent a couple of years as a fraud investigator. I applied for a transfer because I found myself distracting everyone. Even though I knew that the perpetrators of fraud are a small percentage of the population, that was something I knew in my head, but not in my heart. I had to get out of that job to go back to seeing people in a better light.

Ellie's death definitely caused Falk to have problems in his adult life. She was his first love. His best friend made up a story to give them both alibis. He didn't need one but thought it likely that his friend did. His own father asked if he killed Ellie. His home town drove them out. One or two of those things would affect someone's behavior later in life and his was multiplied. It colored everything he did as an adult.

I could not agree more. Falk has unsettled issues from loosing his mother, being forced to leave his home town, and his father's doubting him. Falk was a good guy, he cared for Ellie, but how was he to understand what was going on in her life. Although there was no way I could figure out the, being a pediatrician helped realize that Ellie was being abused. Luke and Aron, and Gretchen suspected something, but they were young themselves, it would have been foolish to expect them to know all and know what to do.