As Good As Dead

“‘And maybe just one word of advice,’ Epps said. ‘Take it or leave it. But I’ve seen people in a self-destructive spiral before. Hell, I’ve represented many of them. In the end, you’ll only end up hurting everyone around you, and yourself. You won’t be able to help it.’”

Max’s lawyer gives this bit of advice to Pip to stop her from pursuing a legal trial that would air Max’s dirty laundry again in court. While the lawyer’s advice is self-serving, it is also accurate. Pip is descending into a dark spiral of rage and revenge. Ultimately, she won’t be able to keep from killing her stalker. However, she also finds a way out after she vents her rage at the broken justice system.

“She couldn’t talk about it, not to a professional, not to anyone. Because it was impossible, incompatible. It had torn her in two and there was no way to stitch those parts back together. It was untenable. Beyond sense. No one could understand, except…maybe him.”

Pip is contemplating her own murderous urges in contrast to her desire to uphold truth and justice. She’s referring to Charlie Green in this quote. His advice in book two stayed with her when he suggested that justice often can’t be found in the courts. Right and wrong isn’t a matter of law but of feeling. This flies in the face of everything Pip has been taught to believe, yet she acknowledges the truth of Charlie’s observation.

“Max Hastings was her cornerstone, the upturned mirror by which she defined everything, including herself. But it was meaningless, twisted, because Max had won; he would never see the inside of a prison cell. The black-and-white smudged back out to gray.”

In the first book of the series, Pip approached justice as a black-and-white concept. However, the facts she uncovered about Andie Bell and many others in the community made her doubt her moral compass. Nobody was completely good or completely bad. Pip finds herself in the uncomfortable gray area between right and wrong.