Jack Wolff

Jack is not responsible for Lydia's death, though the novel builds suspicion around him as its central red herring. He was the last person seen with Lydia the night she drowned, but his role was that of a trusted confidant, not a threat. His honest confession—that he is in love with Nath, not Lydia—contributes to the emotional clarity and turmoil that lead her to the lake.

Jack and Lydia had a mutually protective friendship rooted in shared loneliness rather than romance. Lydia needed the appearance of a social life to satisfy her mother Marilyn's ambitions; Jack needed a companion who made no romantic demands on him while he concealed his sexuality. Their late-night conversations and car rides to parties Lydia never actually attended were small, loyal acts of cover each gave the other.

Yes. Jack is gay and secretly in love with Nath Lee, a fact that drives nearly all of his significant behavior in the novel. He cannot name or express this publicly in their small Ohio town, which is the source of the profound loneliness hidden beneath his charming, popular exterior. His confession of these feelings to Lydia on the night she dies is the most honest moment of his arc.

For most of the novel their relationship is one of open hostility—Nath despises Jack, believing him predatory toward Lydia and ultimately responsible for her death. The dramatic irony is that every glance Nath assumed Jack directed at Lydia was actually directed at him. Once the truth of Jack's feelings is revealed, their antagonism gives way to a tentative, fragile connection that is the closest thing the novel offers to a hopeful future.

Jack tells Lydia that he is in love with Nath—a confession that is the emotional crux of his entire arc. Far from being an act of cruelty, Ng frames it as a rare moment of honesty from a boy who has spent his life concealing himself. Paradoxically, the confession acts as an accidental gift: it helps Lydia see the performed, hollow nature of her own existence, even as the resulting turmoil contributes to her walking to the lake.

Both parents see Jack only as the dangerous social world that swallowed their daughter. Marilyn views him with hostility after Lydia's death and never discovers the protective, caring role he actually played in her life. James's misreading carries a pointed irony: as a Chinese American man who has navigated unjust suspicion his entire life, he nonetheless participates in the same reflexive, assumption-driven gaze directed at Jack.

Hannah, the family's quiet and perceptive youngest child, senses Jack's genuine care for Lydia where the adults see only a threat. Her intuitive reading of him contrasts sharply with Marilyn's hostility and James's suspicion, and Ng uses her perceptiveness to signal to the reader that the community's judgment of Jack is dangerously incomplete—a pattern mirroring how the Lee family itself has always been misread by their Ohio town.

Jack functions as Ng's most carefully constructed red herring. His status as the last person seen with Lydia invites the reader—along with every character—to cast him as the villain, making his eventual revelation as Lydia's loyal secret-keeper all the more disorienting. Ng uses that structural twist to critique how quickly fear and assumption replace genuine understanding, a dynamic that also defines the Lee family's experience of racial otherness throughout the book.