The Climax & Resolution
The Evening of the Attack
The novel's most violent and pivotal sequence takes place at a party following a celebration at the Bar Belle pub — an event connected to Dante's eighteenth birthday. The two storylines that have been running in parallel throughout the novel — Dante's fatherhood and Adam's secret relationship — are brought together at this party. Adam is present. Josh is present. Logan and Paul are present. The scene is set for a catastrophic collision.
Earlier in the evening, Adam is outed in front of the group. This exposure is the trigger for what follows. The information lands badly in this environment — a social world built on masculine conformity, where homophobia has been casual and unchallenged.
The Attackers: Josh, Logan, and Paul
The attack on Adam is carried out by three people: Josh, Logan, and Paul. All three are Dante's friends. This fact — that Adam's attackers are people Dante has trusted — is central to the novel's emotional and thematic force.
The specific roles are equally important. Josh — Adam's own secret boyfriend — is the one who beats Adam. Logan and Paul physically restrain Dante, preventing him from intervening. Josh does not stand back. He does not hesitate. He attacks the person he has been intimate with.
The attackers are Josh, Logan, and Paul — all Dante's friends. Josh, Adam's former secret boyfriend, is the one who beats Adam. Logan and Paul hold Dante back. The attack is a direct product of internalised homophobia: Josh attacks the person he has been with in order to prove, to Logan and to himself, that he is not gay.
Logan's Engineering: A Test of Masculinity
The attack is not spontaneous. It is later revealed that Logan engineered the situation as a test. Logan knows — or suspects — that Josh has been involved with Adam. He uses the moment of Adam being outed to corner Josh: prove you are not gay, or be outed yourself. The logic of the test is the logic of peer pressure taken to its most violent extreme.
Josh does not resist. He is not strong enough — not yet — to withstand the pressure. He chooses violence over vulnerability. In attacking Adam, he attacks the version of himself he cannot accept. Blackman makes this psychologically coherent: Josh's violence is the product of shame, not of hatred in its simplest form. He is not a monster. He is a person who has been broken by the social world he lives in — and who, in his breaking, breaks someone else catastrophically.
The fact that Adam's attacker is his own boyfriend — the person who, in a different world, should be his protector — is the novel's most powerful irony. Blackman constructs this carefully. Josh and Adam's relationship has been built on secrecy and Josh's shame. The attack is the logical endpoint of that shame: Josh, given a social test, chooses violence over honesty. The relationship that Adam hoped might contain connection instead contains the instrument of his hospitalisation. This is what internalised homophobia destroys.
Adam Hospitalised
The attack leaves Adam in critical condition. He is not taken home. He does not recover at the kitchen table. Adam is hospitalised. The severity of the attack is conveyed through the gravity of his medical status: this was not a scuffle. This was a serious, sustained assault.
Dante, after being restrained and unable to stop the attack, reports to the police what happened. He names the attackers. This is an act of moral clarity in a moment of devastation: Dante does not protect his friends by staying silent. He tells the truth — which is, perhaps, the closest he comes in this moment to the journalist he planned to be.
Adam is hospitalised in critical condition. Dante reports to the police what happened and names the attackers. Adam does not go home after the attack. His recovery takes place after his hospitalisation, during which he withdraws, becomes depressed, and eventually faces a suicidal crisis before recovering.
Adam's Recovery: Depression and Withdrawal
After his discharge from hospital, Adam withdraws. He does not bounce back. He stays in his room. He barely communicates. He becomes depressed. The novel does not skip from the attack to recovery. It insists on the reality that violence of this kind has lasting consequences. Adam's mental health deteriorates to the point of a suicidal crisis.
Blackman handles this section with considerable care. Adam's depression is not presented as weakness. It is a rational response to being severely beaten by someone he trusted, in a public setting, while the people he might have looked to for protection were unable to help him. His withdrawal is a form of protection, a body and mind recoiling from a world that has shown itself to be dangerous.
Blackman's choice to show Adam's depression and withdrawal in full is part of the novel's commitment to honesty. A version of this story could have shown Adam attacked and then resilient — a triumph-over-adversity narrative. Instead, Blackman insists on the full cost: hospitalisation, depression, withdrawal, suicidal ideation. This is the real shape of trauma recovery. It is also part of the novel's argument: the violence is not just a bad night. It has consequences that last.
Josh's Confession and Accountability
Eventually, Josh's own story catches up with him. He kisses Dante — revealing to Dante that he is gay himself. He apologises to Adam, unreservedly. And he turns himself in to the police. This does not undo what he did. It does not restore what was taken from Adam. But it is the closest the novel comes to showing the human capacity for accountability among those who have caused harm.
Josh's arc is a tragedy of internalised homophobia: a person who had the capacity for love but was destroyed by shame, who destroyed someone else before finding the courage to be honest. His eventual honesty is not redemption in the full sense — Blackman is too precise for that — but it is an acknowledgement of truth.
Resolution: Resilience and Acceptance
The novel's resolution refuses simple happiness. Adam recovers — physically and, over time, emotionally. He does not become the person he was before the attack. But he survives. Dante, in parallel, has grown into his relationship with Emma. The family, including Tyler, has been brought to a point of greater openness. The reconciliation is hard-won and real.
Blackman ends the novel with Dante embracing fatherhood rather than enduring it, and Adam facing a future rather than being defined by his ordeal. Neither resolution is easy or uncomplicated. But both are earned — through suffering, growth, and the particular resilience that the novel argues is available to people who refuse to let shame govern their lives.